When your time is up, I suppose it’s your time to exit this world.
This happened yesterday near San Francisco. A driver was killed on I-680 when he was struck by a tire near Stone Valley Road in Alamo. The tire came off of a vehicle driving in the opposite direction, and it bounced over the center divide and struck the driver’s windshield.
Tires are heavy, and the closing speed must’ve been over 75 mph (a guess).
In Buenos Aires a dog fell from a 13th floor window, landed on a woman below and both were killed. A person watching this stopped to see what was happening and was hit by a bus and killed. A man who saw both things suffered a heart attack and died.
I dunno about fatal but I have seen more than a few YouTube videos showing a tire flying over a divider and headed at a car so yeah, while uncommon it is not that uncommon. I’d think some of those were fatal encounters (as noted above…big, heavy thing flying at you at high speed is dangerous). Depends where it hits I guess.
There are a number of YT videos; some from just cars being struck & some that are fatal
Now you want to talk about truly bizarre random death. Richard Pananian was not wearing his seatbelt & was ejected in a rollover crash, ending high up on an Interstate sign
My sister’s car was hit by a flying tire once. The details were, I think, fairly unusual. She was stopped at a traffic light. Stopped facing her in the oncoming lane was a young man driving some souped-up sports car. When the light turned green, he decided to play race car driver and floored his accelerator. This put so much torque on his wheels that he SHEARED OFF the lug bolts on one wheel, which came flying forward and hit my sister’s car.
Another odd detail was that the city limit ran down the center of that street. So the guy in the sports car was in one city and she was in another city. It took the cops some time to decide who had jurisdiction.
Indeed they are not. There was one near here just recently. The most frequent culprits of wheel detachment are large heavy trucks like tractor-trailer rigs or dump trucks that have been poorly maintained.
I know I should be ashamed of myself, but I giggled. Those three things together are the perfect elements of a morbid joke!
I witnessed a wheel come off a vehicle at highway speeds and it was alarming watching it bounce at high velocities. It’s definitely a death machine if you get in the way.
This makes me think of a case several years ago. A woman was in a vehicle with her husband. Kids were throwing rocks from an overpass. One hit the windshield and it killed her.
Many years ago I knew a guy who was on call to fix tires on 16 wheelers. One morning he was on a call, saw a driver in distress & stopped to help. He got hit by another car & died instantly.
Some years ago I was driving behind a construction vehicle on a local two lane highway. The vehicle was loaded with stop/yield signs that were not securely fastened and there were two guys standing in the back.
I was following a reasonable distance behind them up a small hill when one of the stop/yield signs suddenly flew up into the air heading straight for my windshield.
I watched in horror as the stop/yield sign danced towards my car. The wind was whipping it around from the stop side to the yield side in the seconds that it hovered above me.
I had no time to react and the guys in the construction truck looked on with equal horror. I truly thought I was going to be killed in a moment.
Suddenly a huge gust of wind tossed the sign to the side of the road inches before it struck my windshield.
I think I pulled over a short distance up the road just to recover emotionally from my near death experience. That would have been a bizarrely random way to exit existence.
I really hate traveling behind vehicles with unsecured items and will sometimes pull over until they are a good distance away.
I know about fatal. In my younger years I commuted to work by motorcycle. It’s easy to quickly turn around or pull over when you’re on a bike, and I frequently stopped to help motorists who had run out of gas, or broken down, or had a flat tire. Once a guy in a nice suit driving a nice Mustang had a flat tire, and I pulled over to change it for him. Turns out he was an exec with the 49ers and he said if I ever wanted tickets to give him a call. Lord only knows why I never did.
Anyway the fatal part of it is that my wife told my mom that I often did this (sometimes in the car with wife and kids there)*. My mom, doing what she does, soon after sent me an article of someone who stopped to help and change someone else’s flat tire and got hit by a runaway tire, and got killed. My mom sent those articles a few times. It was uncanny how often that happens. Or used to. Tires are better at staying on cars these days, I guess.
* — yes when you pull over on the freeway, you have to pull waaaay over, ideally way onto the grassy shoulder. To be much safer.
I actually do. I know someone who died because she mistakenly got on the freeway going the wrong way and died in a head on collision. The other driver did not survive, either. Hers wasn’t a suicide, almost certainly not.
That person in the news clip is an asshole. Okay, if you want to take your life that’s sad and I’m very sorry for you, but jeez don’t take someone else (am innocent victim) with you.
Occasionally here in the congested SFBA CA you hear of the occasional wrong-way car on a freeway.
I’ve never seen it myself but I try to be vigilant. I imagine that you may only have a second or two to react when you see one coming at you. And I imagine people freeze when they see it, not believing what their eyes are telling them. And that freezing up can cost them their life.
