It’s not unheard of. When I lived in Calgary, a similar situation took place.
An elderly driver heading north tried to hit the brakes at an intersection involving two important roads. Think four lanes N/S and six lanes E/W. Initial reports said that he got confused and hit the gas instead of the brake. The car shot through the intersection on the yellow, and into a plaza on the NE side of the intersection.
But that’s not all. The plaza was sunken below road grade. It evened out maybe 100 yards north and 200 yards east, but the point is that the car launched itself into the second floor of a bank in the plaza. The conference room, to be exact. Thankfully, it was a Sunday, so the bank was closed, and the only injured party was the driver. But not badly from the accident; see below. Anyway, seat belts save lives. His saved his.
I was almost a witness, as I and a few friends were at the sports bar a few doors down from the bank, watching a game on TV. We heard the crash, and went out to look. There was a car half-in, half-out of the second floor of the bank.
Of course, fire, police, and ambulance were soon on the scene, and according to later news reports (the incident made the local TV news), the driver did indeed suffer a heart attack, and in trying to stop the car and pull over, hit the gas instead of the brake. It’s a miracle that he didn’t hit any car, nor any pedestrians trying to cross the street.
Anecdotal only, I’m afraid, but I hope that it shows that medical emergencies can cause traffic accidents.
It’s not that hard to get airborne. Outside of Boston I saw a Caddy just bump against the side of the road going 60 at most and launch sideways into the air, over a guardrail, and land top down. If the driver was late and decided to accelerate for some reason I could see launching like that.
The driver of the car I saw flip was wearing his seatbelt, and was fine. If I didn’t wear seatbelts before, I’d sure start to wear them after seeing that.
The KISS concert was cancelled because Paul Stanley was sick. An X (FKA Twitter) link had a picture of him in a hotel room, getting an IV. Now, that’s room service if there ever was such a thing.
He said the media reported it as possible terrorism, which they did. Lots of people did in the immediate aftermath. It was the obvious conclusion tomdraw at first: New York had put out a terror alert the day before, and the destruction of the car looked like a car bomb.
Some yahoo crashing customs at 100 mph and launching uis vehicle 50 ft into the air is not the obvious go-to, and it’s the only other way that car could have been so thoroughly destroyed.
So I don’t really blame anyone who came down on either side of the terrorism/not terrorism question, expecially in the first few hours.
I remember an accident from years ago where a Volkswagen Beetle on a freeway (the 405?) swerved to avoid hitting another car (I don’t remember all the details), and the driver accelerated because he was near a street that crossed over the freeway. That street dipped a bit after crossing the freeway, and the driver thought he could make it onto that street. He missed it by a bit and hit the guardrail on the street. I can still remember the drawing diagramming the trajectory that was in the newspaper account I was reading (this was pre-internet).
53 is older? I consider that middle-aged. I was expecting something in the 70s when you said that.
Not necessarily to do with your post, Sam, but I think it’s important to remember that neither the US nor Canada have any kind of exit controls. Unlike other countries that do, and I’ve passed through exit controls in both the UK and Australia, for example The latter is particularly harsh; it wants to make sure the exit visa tax (AUD$27, last time I was there) is collected and it cancels your visa, so you cannot turn back. At least when I’ve been there and left there. But if you want to leave the US or Canada, you just leave. No big deal; the country (US and Canada) you’re leaving doesn’t care, and leaving doesn’t require any kind of “exit visa” tax. No exit controls, in other words.
What I’m getting at is that — well, if the car was leaving the United States, then it would not encounter US Customs booths. It seems to me that it would be crashing into toll booths, since the Rainbow Bridge is a toll bridge, like all the others that span the US-Canada border, and the last time I was across there, the toll was collected on the US side (though they accepted Canadian currency, thankfully).
So which booths did the car destroy? US Customs booths or bridge toll booths?
