Yes, we were just watching MythBusters.
The tire treads from trucks and bus will fall off and end up on the side of the road. A common nickname is Road Gator.
Anyway, is there any recorded cases of the thread breaking a windshield and killing the driver or passenger of a following car or maybe a motorcyclist?
Jim (My wife wanted to know, I thought it was a good question for the minds of the SDMB)
Try doing a search using keywords like “tire debris killed” (without the quotes).
I saw one blow once right in front of me. (Actually, weirdly enough, I saw two tires blow on the same trip, one in West Virginia and one in South Carolina - what are the odds? Never seen one blow before or since!) It scared the hell out of me, didn’t help that my dad was yelling “Watch the road! Watch the road!” like I’d decided to take a nap at the wheel or something. Anyway, I don’t know about the windshield, but I’d suspect a much greater danger is other vehicles being forced off the road by the truck or driving off the road or into each other avoiding debris. It’s a real challenge to keep steady in your lane when there’s a truck wobbling and pieces of tire coming right at you, but if there’s a car in the next lane over you have to keep your head and hold tight.
I don’t know but I stopped my car once to remove such a “gator” from the (lightly traveled) freeway lane and got blisters on two fingers from the hot radial belts. It had just been deposited there and had not cooled.
I did not have much luck finding anything concerning windshield being broken.
Thanks,
Jim
Not too long ago I was watching one of those shows that features police dash cam videos, and there was one of, IIRC, a semi-truck tire blowing as an officer was conducting a traffic stop. Some of the debris hit him and injured him fairly seriously…I think his bulletproof vest saved his life, so it doesn’t strike me as all that unlikely that there would have been deaths from these things.
A friend of one the guys on our motorcycle email list lost his arm when a Gator flew off and hit him. The arm wasn’t totally severed at the scene but it was totally clear that it couldn’t be saved.
CedricR.
Truck treads are much thicker and heavier than pass. vehicles, commercial trucks are required to have mud flaps. Tread coming off a moving truck is going to continue moving in the same direction. All these things make it very unlikely that they are going to fly through the air high enough to hit a windshield, or a driver, not impossible, but certainly not probable. I’m very skeptical of stories claiming otherwise.
Now hitting a ‘gator’ can easily do damage to the underside of your car, so it would be wise to stop and check after such an occurance.
Here’s the damage to our windshield sustained on I-5 near Sacramento last year when a truck tire exploded near us. The inset photo is the truck that did it – we chased him down and got his insurance info.
My wife was driving, and I watched in amazement as the flying piece of tire flipped end over end coming straight at my face :eek:
She drove off the highway and then regained control and brought the car back on the road.
Avis gave us a brand new car the next day when we reached LA.
FWIW stuff that you never thought could damage a windshield can break it.
I was driving on I5 once in Burbank. Traffic was fairly light, moving about 70 or so. Up ahead I see a piece of drywall corner bead flying though the air over the freeway. Corner bead is made out of very thin galvanized steel and weighs almost nothing. You can easily wad it up with your bare hands. So the air from the passing cars is flipping it over and over.
Just in front of me and two lanes over is a large Oldsmobile (Delta 88?). As he approaches the flying corner bead it is dropping closer to the ground as there is a larger than average space between the Olds and the car in front of it. The corner bead hits the windshield of the Olds end on. It goes right through the windshield and buries itself into the front seat next to the driver. If it had landed a couple of feet to the left, it might have killed the driver.
I remember quite clearly a news story about a woman, a passenger in the front seat, who was killed by a piece of a tread that flew off a tire on a truck and smashed through the windshield of the car she was in on the Washington, D.C. beltway back in the 1980’s.
This reminds me of a story that I can’t forget, about a woman, a passenger in the front seat, who was killed by a piece of a *brake drum * that flew off a truck and smashed through the windshield of the *pickup truck * she was in on the *Wilson Bridge * back in the 1980’s.
As I remember, it hit her in the neck, and she died in front of her husband and children. Horrific.
I wonder if we’re remembering the same story, with slightly muddied details.
A man was killed here from tire debris about three months ago. He was a passenger in a van, IIRC.
I heard almost the same story (I know this one was true, it was on an Oprahish thing… “This could happen to you!”). It was a piece of rebar metal, I believe… in any case, it was a straight bar. The girl survived, though. I don’t think she was an adult…
