My first serious accident call involved an elderly couple driving down a side road that sloped toward our towns lake. As they were heading down the road the driver had a seizure causing him to press on the accelerator and speed toward the lake. The passanger bent down to try and pull his foot off the pedal. While she was bent over they crashed through a garage roof at the bottom of the hill. The trusses killed the driver and would have killed the passenger but she was bent over still and was virtually unharmed. It was a miracle.
Post by disappointedkittens on Oct 26, 2014 13:53:16 GMT -5
The one that shook me up most was that my dad used to drop me off at work in the morning. The one morning he forgot until the last minute he had an early meeting and decided to drop me off a block from work since getting to my office involved a bunch of one ways and extra time. So at a red light I hopped out and was standing on the corner and when the light turned green he went and someone came into the intersection and hit him so hard that the tires came off their rims. I am sure I would have died if I hadn't got out. It was terrifying seeing my dad get in an accident feet away from me. The car was totalled but he was fine.
This happened in the parking lot of our preschool. DD and I were out of the car, standing there for a little bit. I put on her jacket then put on her backpack, but I removed it to lengthen the straps, then put it back on. As soon as we took a step, the car next to me started backing out and I left out a huge gasp and everyone on the sidewalk turned to look. The van braked, and there was about 2 feet between us and my heart was beating so fast. I have no idea wtf they had been doing while sitting in the car, because if they had paid any attention, they should have noticed us next to their car already.
I haven't, but my H has. He was in a car accident while teaching a teen to drive. The teen was driving and he didn't do anything wrong - was stopped and about to turn left. A car rear-ended them at 55 mph and the car rolled into H's side and skidded into the other lane. H's passenger seatbelt broke, which is really scary to think about, but if it hadn't, he wouldn't have been able to lean up when his window broke and would have been dragged along the pavement. He was also able to push the teen up/keep him from falling on him.
Also, they weren't going to take the vehicle that they were driving, but the smaller car had no gas. They took the larger car. If they were in the small one, they would have likely been killed or seriously hurt.
Post by niemand88f on Oct 26, 2014 14:16:05 GMT -5
to some of these stories.
Mine is pretty minor. A couple weeks ago, we were getting McDonalds for dinner. I decided to go to a different one than the most convenient- a little farther and not really on our way home, for no good reason. At the time we would have been going through the drive thru at our normal McDonalds, a panhandler attacked someone in the drive thru for not giving him $. Pulled the passenger out of the car and attacked them and their car with his guitar. They weren't seriously hurt, but that would have been terrifying.
Post by birdistheword on Oct 26, 2014 14:35:34 GMT -5
My old job was on a major road in my town, but you had to drive onto a very steep side road to get into our parking lot. The roads were covered in ice, and I usually took a detour to avoid going up or down this big hill when that was the case. I was leaving for lunch, and for some reason decided it would be OK to go down this hill to the main road. As I started down, my car started sliding and I couldn't stop it. I panicked, but at the last second I was able to regain some control and bail out into a snow drift in the ditch right before I flew into the oncoming traffic. There was a giant truck coming that would have plowed right into my driver's side door if I would not have been able to stop myself. I was shaken up for a while after that.
When I was 4 my parents and some friends rented a ski house in Vermont. We arrived when it was dark out so it wasn't until the next morning that we could check out the area surrounding the house. I wanted to go sledding so my dad took me out back. He did one trial run with me and then I begged to go down by myself on the smaller sled.
I went down the hill but didn't turn at the end like I was supposed to and then just disappeared out of sight into some trees. My Dad ran down and then realized that there was a steep fall off, kind of like a cliff, and that it looked like the property went on forever but was instead divided by this gorge. I had gone over the edge but got my left arm caught in a small tree on the way down and was hanging there. He was able to climb down and grab me. I broke my left arm but otherwise was fine. My father, however, had a harder time dealing with it and had to go to therapy apparently.
Post by underwaterrhymes on Oct 26, 2014 14:40:37 GMT -5
I posted this before on the Nest. I think angelaa called me a rube. LOL.
When I was a freshman in high school, two older girlfriends and I were driving home from a field trip/craft fair. We got stuck in traffic and were sitting patiently through several light cycles. I don't know if there was an accident, or what, but we hadn't moved in awhile. No big. We were having fun, singing along with music, enjoying the fact that we'd had a day off of school.
All of a sudden, a little white and black gate came down behind our car. We all looked to our right and saw a train. There was a car in front of us. A gate behind us and a car behind that. I was in the back seat and I still remember rolling down the window and it only came down halfway. Don't know why I didn't try to go out the door, but in my head the window seemed the best option.
Erica had once had a dream that she had died during the song Toy Soldiers by Martika and it was playing, so she turned the radio off. We were all screaming at each other and the people in the cars around us got OUT of their cars and were screaming at us too. We could see the sparks coming up from the wheels of the train as it tried to stop.
The people in the car in front of us got back in the car and drove over the curb, and we went to move into the space in front of us, but the car stalled. I don't know how she did it, but Erica had the presence of mind to turn the car off, turn it back on and lurch into the spot in front of us. Not two seconds later, the train went by and we felt the whole car shake.
When I was about 11 years old my mom wanted to take my sisters and I on a drive to the mountains on Saturday morning
Just as we were all getting in the car my Aunt ( my moms older sister) and my cousins drove up. My Aunt had said she had a feeling that she just had to come see my mom that morning. Well turns out my mom was dealing with some bad depression at the time and she had planned to drive us to the mountains and drive the car off a cliff. If my Aunt didn't have her feeling or if she left five minutes later, who knows what would have happened.
Omg, holy shit. So glad your aunt listened to her instinct.
Post by RoxMonster on Oct 26, 2014 18:18:07 GMT -5
And I wonder, too, how many close calls we have and don't even know.
This summer when we were in the Smokies, we did a ton of hiking. Some of the trails were not busy at all and H and I were the only people around. I always felt totally safe, even knowing there was the threat of bears (or creepers). We were just aware of our surroundings and I never felt unsafe.
Until we stopped off at a trail on the way up to Clingman's Dome that had a trail head on the side of the road up the mountain there. I had read about the trail and how it wound through a bunch of spruce firs and thought it would be pretty. It was a gloomy day and no one else was at the trail. We got out of the car, got our backpack on and started heading down the trail. We got about 100 yards and I stopped and told H I didn't want to keep going. I had absolutely no reason to feel uneasy about the situation, but I did. Something just didn't feel right about being out alone on this particular trail. We turned around, left, and hiked another. As far as I know, nothing bad happened out on that trail that day, though it seemed to be a much lesser-traveled trail. So I have no way of knowing, but I often wonder when I get gut feelings like that if I did just avoid something horrible or if my alarms were going off for no reason.