I saw one as a kid on the interstate. I think it’s right what they say about time slowing down when some things happen. I distinctly remember seeing a cloud of dirt fly into the air up ahead, thinking “woah, there’s a wheel in the air,” then “no, it’s an axle”, then “it’s a whole car!”
The worst one I’ve ever known was the one I don’t remember. I was in it, and was the only one unhurt in the family, but all I know about it is what I’ve heard. To this day I remember looking down at my new red shoes and then being in a squad car.
I was sitting at an intersection one afternoon, third car back, left lane, waiting for the red light to change. A car came across from the far side without stopping and I watched it while I wondered if there was any way to move out of the spot I was in. He hit the first car in line and I was the last of the chain reaction. And there wasn’t a dang thing I could do but watch it happen.
I did see one I wasn’t involved in early one morning. I was sitting at a red light, in the left lane, with a car next to me, both of us well stopped. The light had been red for a little bit. Suddenly a car hit the car next to me from behind. The only thing I can figure out is that the driver just wasn’t paying attention. The only other possibility is that he was blinded by the sun. I’m betting on the former. I wondered if I should stay to give a witness statement, but the whole thing seemed pretty straight forward. I didn’t think they’d need me.
Sure lots of times. But nothing horrific.
One that jumped to mind was from when I wrote parking tickets for the city. One of the guys that regularly scammed the system backed out in front of someone else and got hit.
He wanted me to testify that the other guy was going too fast and was angry because I could honestly say that I am not trained to judge the speed of a moving vehicle.
I was a passenger in a van once when one of our front tires blew out on the 101 loop. Wasn’t quite an accident, but very close. Fortunately the exit ramps had wide shoulders and Arizona, even urban Arizona, is mostly empty space. You stop fairly quickly when two out of four wheels are in loose desert dust and gravel.
My father has a much better story. He was driving home from work one day when his car was hit and completely totaled – we’re talking everything forward of the actual passenger compartment was a mess of twisted metal, if it was still present at all. (Dad walked away with a bruise on the bridge of his nose. Seriously. He didn’t even need a bandaid.) The insurance company had no trouble believing that the guy who hit him had run a red light at full speed, inasmuch as Dad’s account was corroborated by a number of police officers who had been outside taking a break from their work at Phoenix PD headquarters, about fifty feet away on the other side of the intersection. 
Accidents we’ve not been involved in you mean?
I remember my own rear end shunt, hearing squealing tyres and seeing a bright yellow Ford Focus barrelling towards me, not something that’s easy to miss in the rear view mirror :rolleyes:
Way too many.
The most memorable and grossest was when I was riding a motorcycle in Vietnam, behind a truck. The scooter to my right had two guys on it, no helmets. The truck didn’t have brake lights. It stopped, and I managed to stop my bike with my helmet about an inch from its rear bumper. The scooter wasn’t so fortunate, and the two guys went under the back of the truck. The tuck’s bumper scalped the driver. The driver’s head went back into the passenger’s face and knocked him out. The driver rolled around a bit as we tried to help him, then realised his scalp was hanging over the front of his face, and stuck it back on again. The passenger eventually came round, and they got back on the scooter and rode off! The passers-by were more interested in a westerner on a motorcycle than they were in the injured guys.
I saw the aftermath of about 7 other wrecks in Vietnam, many of them with fatalities. They drive like assholes over there.
In the UK I’ve seen a five-car pileup, where someone’s head went through the windshield, and another time I was doing 85 on the motorway and got overtaken by a sedan doing at least 100, packed with about 7 or 8 members of an extended family of south Asians. I thought “wow, he’s going a bit fast” and just as I did, his car lost control, hit the verge, bounced off it, spun round and ended up crossing the motorway again and coming to a halt on the median. Amazingly nobody was hurt, and the motorway was fairly empty apart from me, who had been keeping an eye on them.
Me, I’ve been in five wrecks, none of them terribly serious.
I was on the bus going down a main highway and had rung the buzzer for my stop. As I walking to the front of the bus, a car taking the exit misses the curve and slams into a pole holding electric wires. Pole starts to go down, wires rip, sky lights up. Bus immediately pulls over. I sit down. Woman gets out of car, starts weaving. People pull over, get out of cars. People who heard crash come out of houses. Wires are waving, sky lights up again. The woman starts heading back to her car, huge guy runs up, grabs her, pulls her off to side street.
The bus starts up again and lets me off a few streets up. I go back and join the crowd of people. The police are already there. The guy who grabbed the woman was an EMT, and he might have saved her life.
My friend was driving me and another friend to get pizza after our first final exam of high school, and someone a few cars ahead did some sort of tricky manoeuvre which resulted in many cars braking at once.
Unfortunately my friend didn’t brake fast enough and we ended up hitting the car in front. Even more unfortunate was the fact that this car also belonged to one of our friends.
The car was written off but amazingly no-one needed a hospital visit. I think it’s to blame for my friend’s exam results for the remaining exams - she didn’t get what she wanted, and I’m pretty sure my friend (the other passenger) and I distracted her and partly caused the accident. I feel a bit guilty.
I didnt see the initial point of contact (if any), I just remember seeing a minivan skidding across a major intersection as if some invisible hand of Loki reached down and scooped it up then tossed it like a toy, making it bounce from front bumper to top to back bumper in a series of 3-5 flips.
I saw the lady barreling towards me in stopped traffic on the highway just before she slammed into the back of my small pick-up. As she wasn’t looking at me, she was looking over her shoulder to the next lane over, I knew she was going to hit me and braced for it (both feet standing on brake pedal with all the weight I could muster). That didn’t prevent me from being thrust forward into the car stopped in front of me, but I’m sure it reduced the force of the impact. The woman in front of me had the least damage to her car (just a minor scratch on her bumper), but she was livid. My truck was damaged pretty badly but still drivable and the car driven by lady that hit me was totaled.
Same pickup (as a passenger), driving a two-lane county route on a cold, windy Christmas day, was pushed off an icy road by a gust of wind into a ditch and flipped over onto the roof of the cab. Seatbelts, no injuries, but it was really weird watching the world turn upside down.
Driving through St. Louis late at night, we pulled up to the aftermath (it happened only seconds before we rounded the curve) of a drunk woman slamming into the barrier on an interchange. She had busted a few teeth out when her face smashed into the steering wheel and she was bleeding profusely, but would not get out of the car. Although several witnesses tried to stop her, she ended up driving off leaving parts of her car (including a bumper, IIRC) on the interchange. That kind of scared me wondering if she made it home without actually killing someone.
A few. I saw one when I was a kid, and my grandma was driving us kidlets to the Y. T-bone in an intersection at fairly low speeds. I saw another driving with my mom once; car flipped OVER in the middle of an interchange, though I only saw that out of the corner of my eye. And once, in a videogame store with my ex-husband, I heard a crash outside, whirled around, and saw an accident on the main drag.
Reminds me of the time I was in a limo heading away from the airport in Bangkok (lest you think I’m an asshole, it’s my one luxury in Thailand - a new Merc with an English speaking driver is only about 40% more than a deathwish 1977 model rusty cab - and I only do it to or from the airport). This limo driver was a very proud man: proud of being Thai (as all Thais are) and proud of his English language skills. I liked him. Anyway, as we drove through the boring suburbs that are adjacent to an airport anywhere, he proudly adopted the role of tourist coach driver, and gave me a running commentary:
- “On your left, you will notice the new dog biscuit factory”
- “This is a model of imported Z2000 traffic lights”
- etc
Then we came to an elephant wandering across the road. You’d think a western passenger might like this, but he didn’t: instant road rage and “geddafuckouttamyway” in Thai out the window.
But then we came to a really, really nasty accident. A fatal, by the look of it. A blood-spattered, through-the-windshield type one. The limo driver didn’t say anything. When I looked aghast, he just kinda shrugged as if to say, “eh, what can ya do?” and then straight back into, “notice the refurbished City Hall on our right…”
When my daughter was still in high school, barely a driver herself, we were sitting in a fast-food place parking lot beside a light-controlled intersection. The main artery had the red, and traffic from the side street was crossing. From the south, a silver sedan came speeding right past all the stopped cars (it was truly odd that her lane was empty) and into the intersection, where she smacked the back end of a small pickup truck that was crossing, spinning it around. The driver of the sedan was a high school girl (my kid knew who she was) on her cell phone. The driver of the pickup was a woman in maybe her 40s or 50s. And there were a gazillion witnesses.
The sheriff arrived shortly - 2 or 3 of them, in fact - and there were so many witnesses, they didn’t even bother to come over to the parking lot. We hung around long enough to see that the older woman was out of her vehicle and walking around, and when we were sure the sheriff wasn’t going to interview all of the bystanders, we just went home.
I later heard this wasn’t the first accident that girl caused.
Yes I have and I’ve seen horrible non fatal ones a minute or two after the accident. I’ve seen gruesome ones just after the emergency people arrive and nothing is covered. There was the first fatal accident for a Memorial day a few miles from my house. A nun’s car went flying over the opposite road shoulder, flew trough some 10" diameter trees and flipped into the field, all this going down a slight hill. The car was two feet tall. They didn’t remove the trees that were sheared off 6 to 8 feet from the ground for about 5 years. I hated driving by those trees. I still feel bad thinking about it. The car wreak last spring just across the road, was a miracle escape from death. Every thing hit just right to say this guys life so he could walk away from the accident. I never did post those pictures when I wrote about the incident. The SUV roll over a block down the road a week later with kids was a lucky no deaths one too. That was in a family friend’s yard. For a month before the accident across from our house, I saw a couple almost head on highway crashes every week from our yard. I had already trained myself not to look if I heard screeching tires, because I didn’t want to see somebody’s life getting snuffed out for shitty driving.
I’ve actually seen only one accident happen, other than the half-dozen I’ve been in (including the T-bone I caused by running a red light, but that’s a case of dumbassness for another thread sometime.) I was driving home from Denver on I-76 on a straight stretch of roadway just northeast of the small town of Wiggins. I’d just passed a truck when a Toyota pickup came screaming up behind me. Before I could pull over for him, he was in the right lane, past me, and tailgating the guy just off my right front bumper. He finally passed that guy on the right shoulder and accelerated. I watched him get smaller and smaller – I’m guessing he was doing between 85 and 90 – weaving in and out of traffic, when suddenly, a little over a mile ahead of me, there was an explosion of dust off on the right and I saw the pickup go airborne and then roll. I reached for my cell phone and started looking for a mile marker, but by the time I’d made the call the 911 line was busy, so I figured most of the other dozen drivers who’d seen it had gotten through. There were a half-dozen cars and trucks stopped alongside the road when I got there so I didn’t even stop. I remember seeing the driver lying on the ground about 10 yards from his truck – he did not look well at all, all crumpled up and stuff. There was crap from the pickup strewn all over.
I’m sure I’ve posted before about the time when I saw a car kill a girl. I did some emergency first aid, which revived the third grade girl, but she later died in the hospital. I saw nightmares about that for years after. It was hard, because the mother came to the location, while I was holding her little daughter’s tongue out of her air pipe, and I was trying to keep the mother calm while I was scared shitless because I figured the kid was a gonner.
I saw a truck come apart on the road ahead of me. One wheel went to the right, another went to the left. It was snowy, and I couldn’t stop to see what happened.
My sister in laws birthday dinner was in Madison. We ate while ice and snow fell. There was wind too. There were accidents all along I90-94 near Madison. We could hardly stay on the road at 24 mph. My brother and sister in law flipped and rolled their 1 week old truck, and we drove past having to watch the lady merging off the ramp that was headed for us, instead of the flipped truck. We had to go directly back to Madison after getting to Portage. She was stuck upside down in the truck for some time, as there were so many accidents of the same severity. The whole time she was praying nobody slide off and hit the truck because that might have been fatal. He lost all the tools for his job that were in the truck bed tool box. Most of them were there before the tow truck took the truck, but 4 hours later at the tow yard the box and tools were gone. We figure that the employees of the yard took them and not some person from the neighborhood. No high speeds were involved in the accident, just wet glare ice and wind. He couldn’t get the truck he wanted to replace the one wreaked, because the one he had was rare luck it was available when he bought it.
Oh, crap, I just remembered another one! It was in Longmont, Colo., and if you look up 21st Avenue on a Google Map of Longmont, you’ll see that there’s a stretch of it between about Hackberry and Main Street that is divided by the Oligarchy Ditch. I was driving home for lunch one day and there was another car in front of me on Francis Street as we approached 21st going northbound. The driver in front of me looked to her left at the stop sign, naturally, looking for cars coming in the east-bound lanes. Seeing none, she started forward, not seeing the two girls on bicycles going hell-bent for leather the wrong way up the eastbound lanes. She creamed the girl in front and I will never forget the sight of that girl flying up in the air. I thought she was going head-first into the ditch, but she bounced off of a chain link fence instead. I stopped and ran up, expecting to see one dead little girl, but she was lying there, blinking her eyes and trying to breathe. Fortunately, the driver who hit her was a pediatric nurse from the hospital and was able to check her out while we waited for the ambulance. I checked back at the hospital later and the girl had suffered some bad bruises but nothing more. What a very lucky little girl!
Going to Long Lake campground near Dundee Wisconsin, we ran across a car forty to fifty feet into a bog, partially sunk. It could only get there by excessive speed on that road, and likely drunkenness. We waited outside the DNR campground office for an hour until they opened. At that time you could sign up for un renewed camping sites, and we were one of the first in the large crowd that was waiting. A guy forces his way through and starts in on the ranger while they are unlocking the door. he’s yelling everything right off the bat. Apparently he was the owner of that car and had done it the night before. The ranger has about 50 people that want a camp site and were there before this guy came around. He’s bitching that the DNR took my driver’s license last night, and I want it back now. His license wouldn’t be there anyhow, because the headquarters is south of Dundee, miles away. So the guy yelled at this person for 5 minutes. Everybody was waiting for a swing, at which point I think the group would have acted against him and for the ranger. I was surprised he was able to show up and not already spending the time in jail.
Years ago, I was driving back home across Austin from my girlfriend’s house. It must have been a little after midnight, so the roads were fairly deserted. Anyway, there I was driving my beater north on IH35, just before the MLK exit area. There was one car in front of me and in the next lane.
In my rear view mirror, I saw a truck coming up fast in that lane. I remember thinking, “I don’t think he sees that car in front of him.” He slammed into the car, but had enough momentum to keep going. The car, though, got knocked sideways and then flipped over twice to end up sideways against the overpass support on the MLK exit. The driver’s door was pinned closed.
I stopped, and ran over to see if there was anything I could do. The driver was trapped in his seat, against the steering column. I knew better than to move him, so I just stood there keeping him company until the cops showed up- this was before cell phones, so even though we were basically just across the highway from the police station, it still took like fifteen minutes for someone to show up. What really pissed me off was how many people just drove past, rather than stopping to help.
I told the cops what I’d seen, but I’d been unable to get the trucks license plate. They thanked me, and I continued on home.
About halfway home, I saw the truck had hit another vehicle as well… but this one was an 18 wheeler. He didn’t keep driving after that one. I never did find out what happened to the hitter or the hittee.