Only two, both happened literally right in front of me. I was out driving our company Mule (slightly bigger than an golfcart) around on some property and pulled up to an intersection. Two ladies speed through that intersection at the same time and the oncoming one Tboned the car going across. They both got knocked literally to within 5 feet of me.
The other incident happened back in high school. My buddy had an ancient Dart that was always dieing. Coming back from some concert it died on a dark road in front of an elementary school. We get out to push it and noticed a truck coming towards us. Instead of merging over to the next lane, he plows into my friends car sending over the curb, coasting through the parking lot, and crashing into the front of the school. The driver was absolutely hammered.
My mother was driving us up I-95 in dense traffic and I wan’t paying attention to the road when there was suddenly a huge cloud of dirt to the right. I remember distinctly seeing the dirt, then seeing a tire way up in the air, then seeing an axle, then realizing it was an entire car. It must have been at least 20 feet up. I still don’t understand how it got that high. It landed upside down in a grassy area.
We pulled over for several hours along with many other people and my mom got out while other people stayed in their cars. Apparently she had seen that car hit another car before going off the road. Someone who was ejected from the airborne car ended up with some major injuries and was apparently going to sue the other driver, but my mother had given him her phone number and helped put an end to that by offering to testify on the matter.
The most recent accident I’ve witnessed involved me fumbling for the shifter while I helplessly watched an SUV back into me in the Taco Bell drivethrough, but it only scratched my car and I did not pursue the matter.
- I kinda witnessed this one, but I don’t think anyone involved saw what was happening. In August last year I was in Boston visiting my parents, and was taking my father’s pickup to get gas. I was parked at the pump and was staring at the tank lid trying to see how to open it when suddenly there was a loud crunch and the truck lurched about three inches backward. An elderly woman had driven away from the tanks and was waiting to pull out onto the street. Apparently, she pulled out too far and backed up a bit, but then forgot to shift out of reverse. Luckily, nobody was hurt (she was also lucky she hit the truck rather than smash into the tanks or go sailing out the other side of the station into heavy traffic). Her car was damaged badly enough to require towing, but the truck just had cosmetic damage to the bumper.
The funny part was that this was the first time I’d driven in something like seven years and I was nervous about being out of practice. When I got home, the first words out of my mouth were “It wasn’t my fault!”
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About 10 years ago in rural Japan, I witnessed a car vs. pedestrian accident. The ped was crossing a relatively empty street in the middle of the block. She was looking to her left, as that’s where traffic would be coming from. Unfortunately, a guy who had parked further down (to her right) decided to move the car and started coming up the street backwards. I could see the whole thing, but just kept thinking, “they can see each other, they can see each other, they have to be able to see each other, they have to oh shit they can’t see each other.” I got halfway through shouting a warning before the car smacked into her. She got her bell rung and scraped her elbow when she fell down, but luckily the driver was going that fast.
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About two or three years ago in downtown Tokyo. There’s a corner near my old apartment (between a medium-size side street and a relatively large market street) that’s impossible to see around. There are no sidewalks, and the building there comes right to the edge of the traffic area. However, if you’re driving on the correct side of the side street, you should be opposite this corner and not have visibility problems. If you’re on the market street, you have the right-of-way. One morning, I saw a delivery van coming down the market street, and a cyclist coming down the side street on the wrong side of the road with no intention of stopping to check for traffic. He got to the intersection just as the van came into view and ended up skidding underneath it. By some miracle, the van driver saw the dumbass at the last second out of the corner of his eye and managed to slam on the brakes quickly enough to stop before the rear wheels rolled over him.
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Yesterday morning. Nobody crashed but the fates sure were being tempted. I was cycling to work on a fairly large (4-6 lane) downtown street, keeping up with the traffic flow, when I see another cyclist on the opposite side of the street riding straight into oncoming traffic. Wherever there were parked cars, buses pulled over to pick passengers, cars turning onto side streets, etc., he’d just swing out into the middle (oncoming) lanes, then swing back to the side again. I heard at least two people slam on their brakes because of that idiot, and I expect to see an emergency crew in the near future scraping him out of a truck grille.
Jeez, when I think about it, I’ve seen dozens of accidents occur right in front of me, not even counting the five or six I’ve been in myself. I have to agree with some of the other posters here that driving, in America or elsewhere, is just about the most dangerous day-to-day thing one can do. Anyway, here are just some of the events I’ve seen:
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My hometown of Johnstown, PA: I’m following an OMIH (Old Man in Hat) in an ancient Dodge Dart. Going only about 15 mph to begin with, he suddenly veers off the road, sideswipes a telephone pole (wood goes flying every which way), recovers control and just keeps on going.
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Somewhere in the mountains West of Denver on a Labor Day weekend, I’m at a stop sign waiting for traffic to clear when a car stopped to make a left turn from the main road gets hit from behind by another car going at least 45 mph. I distinctly see the heads of the driver and front seat passenger burst through the windshield of the vehicle that rear-ended the stopped car. Everyone involved suffered serious injury, as one might expect.
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Rte 30, near Ligonier, PA: drunk yahoo in an old Chevy Nova loses control while trying to illegally pass me on the right, spins out, hits the guardrail and a couple of trees, and ends up being thrown from the car, miraculously without serious injury. Several friends of said yahoo manage to collide with each other coming to a stop at the accident scene. I’ve mentioned this one in another thread.
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Houston, TX: riding back to the office with my soon-to-be ex-boss from a lunch where I’ve just been told I’m about to be laid off, a kid on a quad bike approaching from the other direction hits a culvert and goes flying over the handlebars with an appropriately shocked expression visible on his face.
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Houston, TX again: over the years I’ve watched several times as drunk drivers sideswiped guardrails or other vehicles, or otherwise fell off the road, while I was driving home from various venues in the evening.
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In and around Paris, France: almost too many to name; the two most spectacular were the guy on the Harley who was launched over the hood of a taxi that had turned left right in front of him, and some fool in a VW Golf who hit another car hard enough to spin it around at an intersection, but kept on going without even slowing down.
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I was jogging near the intersection of Alafaya and Colonial during rush hour and I saw traffic start to slow down just past the intersection toward Waterford Lakes: you never know when it will be totally free going that direction or totally blocked up during rush hour. Anyway there were several SUV’s and or minivans in the left hand lane and they “accordioned” into each other, since none of them had the stopping power to go from 40 to 0 in 30 feet. Didn’t look like any injuries though.
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Near the same intersection (and that isn’t even the most dangerous intersection on that block :eek: ). I was pulling out of Papa John’s and needed to get to Woodbury, and in order to do that I needed to pull into the left hand turn lane across 3 lanes of traffic across Alafaya. There was a car coming toward me on a collision course with me but I pulled out anyway, since there was a car to the right of me and the car coming toward me would have to stop in order to avoid it.
But the car didn’t stop. Maybe the driver wanted to “teach me a lesson” and scare me, but the driver actually sped up, and hit the car just next to me right after I passed it.
- Driving on I-95 somewhere in the South, I came to a small bridge on both sides of the road. On the other side of the road a car went out of control and careened into the sides of the bridge and several other cars. I didn’t look too closely as I wanted to focus on the road ahead of me, but there was debris flying all over the place. I looked ahead and in back of me to see if any of it was coming down toward me. As I was looking in my rear view mirror, a car crossed the grass median at a 90 degree angle and into my side of the ditch! That was quite a chain reaction, and there’s a good chance someone died.
I just thought of another one. No one was hurt, but the circumstances were about as strange as they get.
A friend and I had traveled from San Diego to Orange county to go dancing. We were on our way home at about 1 AM. We both had stopped drinking hours before, so it wasn’t my imagination.
We decided to stop for a bite.
The off ramp dropped you down probably 50 feet lower than the highway roadbed. There weren’t any street light on the exit, so it was very dark once we dropped below the level of the highway.
We were half way down the ramp, when a car fell out of the sky, landing maybe 20 feet in front of us. I stood on the brakes and stopped about three feet from the car, now crosswise on the ramp.
I got out of my car and walked over, but no one got out. I knocked on the window, no one responded, so I opened the passenger door. There were 5 hispanic men inside, all of whom slowly turned to look my way. I asked if they were all ok. They all looked very puzzled. One finally decided I needed an answer, so he said, Yeah, they were fine, but how did I get into their car going down the freeway.
They were so drunk, they had no idea they had fallen off the freeway!
I closed the door, and we called 911 from Denny’s, at the bottom of the ramp. :dubious:
I´ve seen one as a witness and one as participant.
It was a minor crash, a car T-boned a van on an intersection, it was quite interesting in that within a split second I figured out the inevitability of the collision, so the rest of the time I was just waiting for the impact, although I´m quite certain that the whole anticipation lasted only about half a second; it´s amazing how much the brain can register and process in such a small time frame.
As for the second I was hit by a car (starring as a pedestrian) which hurled me several meters away, I was told that I instinctivelly protected my head on the apogee of my trajectory, landed on my back and earned a uni-scratch on it, it didn´t hurt much but caused some discomfort in the bed. The impact point on my left thigh didn´t hurt one bit, I´m still perplexed by that since I was hit there with enough force to fly 6 or 7 meters and there was not a mark, no hematome, no nothing.
:eek:
The only one I can remember was one I didn’t see happen, just the aftermath. When I was a kid the family were driving home after Christmas along the snow-covered highway when we were the first car to come along a flaming wreck of an accident. We pulled over and my Dad rushed over to help. Everybody was safe except for one young woman who was trapped in her flaming car by her seatbelt. My Dad has a little penknife and was trying to cut her out but couldn’t in time. I think that she might have already been dead by the time we arrived, but it is still scared the crap out of me. I distinctly remember standing outside our car watching the flames worried because my brother had gotten a chemistry set for Christmas and I thought the chemicals would catch on fire and burn up our car too.
Then there was another one that happened a few years ago on that same stretch of black ice coved winter road. This time it was just me and my parents in the car and we watched the car in the opposing lane start spinning and then go down an embankment. My Dad and I both have first aid training so we got out of car to see if everyone was ok. We could barely walk across the highway it was so slippery and when we got to the curb we saw that the car had gone down at the perfect angle so it didn’t roll and they were able to drive to an access road and go right back to the highway. After cleaning their seats I’m sure 
A fellow who ran across the highway was biffed by the car ahead of me. I watched him do a mid air flip and hit the pavement, while I was locked up to stop. My front bumper was 3-4 feet from where he landed.
Following another fire engine, an approaching vehicle veered off the road, entered a sweep culvert, which launched the car, inverted, back across the road at a 45 degree angle into the side of the engine ahead of mine.
Four lane road with “turn lanes” in the middle. I’m in the left lane, because I’m coming to a light where I have to turn left.
This road goes through town, so the speed limit is 45-50. There’s a car next to me.
I glance in my rear view mirror and there is a big white truck barrelling down the road. He must have been doing at least ninety. I start to slow down so I can edge over to the turn lane. Before I can do anything he slams into the rear of the car next to me, pushing them into the ditch.
I’ve slowed down by this point, so the truck crosses in front of me, crosses the other two lanes going the other direction, and slams into a telephone pole.
I’m in shock. It happened so fast! I fumble for my cell phone, but by the time I’d gotten through to 911 they’d already learned of the accident and were on their way.
Lots of fender crumplers, only one movie-worthy crash. We had just started east from California on vacation and were on the west side of Victorville, which is (or was) a dangerous stretch of two-lane road with lots of deep dips to allow flashfloods to pass through. So I was annoyed when someone in a full-sized van blasted past me on a blind stretch, since I felt they were endangering my kids.
The van quickly disappeared around the corner ahead of us. As I rounded the corner, I could see a pickup truck up ahead, stopped dead in the road with his turn signal on, waiting for oncoming traffic to clear. The woman in the van apparently didn’t realize he was stopped until she was right on top of him. She swerved to the right into a wide gravel pullout, slid sideways, and her wheels caught a dirt berm. The van launched into the air in a sideways roll, spun a couple of times and landed on its wheels, slamming into a ridge of earth, which crumpled the front end.
I had braked hard to avoid the mess (there was a ton of dust in the air), and pulled into the pullout to help whomever was in the van. I ran over to the passenger side, but couldn’t get the door open. I was yanking on the thing when the woman ran around from the driver’s side screaming something that sounded like “my God!!” I thought maybe there were children inside and flagged down a truck, which happened to be a state worker who had a sledge hammer in the back. He was about to swing it at the window when she hollers, “No! You’ll hurt my dog!”
I figured she had enough help and sidled away to my own car to continue my vacation trip, since I didn’t want to have to spend it appearing in court as a witness. The old guy in the pickup? He’d made his turn and disappeared.
I’ve actually got an accident report form right next to my keyboard here. (Not that much of a co-incidence, it’s been here since last May. :D) Let me have a quick refresher here…
A car passed me as I was riding my bike down a fairly quiet residential area, then started drifting to the right which was a problem ‘cause someone had parked an old Econoline van by the curb. As I was on my bike, I just had to watch (me-> 
:dubious: :eek: ) as the driver figured things out a few feet before the van and jerked the car the the right, going over the curb and squeezing between the van and a light standard (breaking off the passenger mirror). Things might have turned out ok if not for the ~2’ wide tree that intercepted the bumper a few feet later.
The car hadn’t been going very fast, but from that point on it was a total gong show. I parked my bike on the sidewalk and walked up to the passenger door (lots of mist/steam/fog fogging the windows, both airbags went off, etc). The driver was an older lady, who jumps out saying “Get out! Get out!” I open the passenger door and there’s this older guy in an arm sling. I’m pretty shocked but trying to be helpful, so I ask him if he’s ok but he just babbles nonsense (turns out she was driving him home from the hospital; he’d had a stroke a while ago). I help him out of the car but he keeps nearly collapsing as I’m holding him, which is when this little dog jumps out of the car. I’m just hoping I can get this guy somewhere without dropping him when a lady passing by stops to help (naturally being infinitely more help than I was), and we get him on the ground just as the horn starts going off.
At that point a bunch of people from the community league across the street had come over, and I decide that helping disconnect the car battery is both a more fun and appropriate thing for a man of my talents (or lack thereof) to be doing, so I help with that. My last contributions were to inform the paramedics about what the driver had told me about the passenger, and mention that they might want to check on her as the cruise-control buttons from the steering wheel had broken off in her hand during the crash and she’d been clutching them for the past 10 minutes without apparently noticing. Oh, and making sure someone was looking after the dog.
The cops told me she said she was trying to avoid a dog in the road, but the only dog I saw was in the car. :dubious: I figure she’d had a very stressful day and got distracted by her husband or her dog. Oh, and every time I think of that accident, I’m irrationally annoyed at the one cop for telling me east was west and thus reversing my description of the accident on my statement form. :o
I’ve seen some minor ones, and then there’s this:
I was 16, walking down the street in the small beach town we lived in. A small blue car swerved abit, and I could see that the driver was slumped forward. At that instant, a Ford Pinto with a surfboard on top turned from a sidestreet into the path of the blue car, saw the other car, and slammed on the brakes, sending the surfboard through the windshield of the other car and decapitating the passenger, an 80 year old woman, before the two cars collided. I saw the whole thing. It was just horrible.
What happened was the 80year old driver had a heart attack (died), and lost control, but the Pinto had turned innappropriately into it’s path. Oddly, the most vivid memory I can always visually recall is the woman’s hand, with brightly red painted fingernails, dropping out limply from under the white sheet on the gurney after the ambulance came. The mental image of the decapitation stays mostly buried in my mind, but once in awhile I have vivid flashbacks of it. And it plays in slow-motion, then.
That poor woman; she must have gone out with the horror of her husband suffering a heart attack, trying desparetely to figure out what to do, and then…
That still makes me cry almost three decades later. 
I’ve seen a lot but there are two I can remember plainly.
I was stopped at a red light, and the light for the cross traffic had just changed from green to red, when a car came through the intersection and hit a kid who was just stepping into the street.
There was a driver who decided she would make a quick left turn in a short break of oncoming traffic. Unfortunately, the break was too short and the back half of her Cadillac was plowed into by a Mercedes. What I remember most clearly was the entire scene shifting into slow motion, giving me time to say to my wife “Uh-oh!” It also proved to me once and for all that the rear half of a big Cadillac is tougher than the front half of a Mercedes.
I was following a friend late one night, we caught the green light just right and didn’t have to slow down. A car coming from the crossroad to our right blew the light and shot beween us. It hit a car on my road coming towards me on the other side. Wow I didn’t know a car could spin around two or three times like that.
We jumped out and went to the car that got hit. The guy was slumped over against the seatbelt making horrible breathing sounds. I didn’t know what to do other than reach in and turn off the ignition. It was what inspired me to go for EMT classes.
Then there was the accident that changed my life. A couple of us were on our motorcycles on a twisty winding mountain road. We may or may not have been riding in a spirited manner. My best friend who sometimes lacks discretion when it comes to personal safety got ahead of us by a good clip. The rest of us were slowed down waiting for an oppertunity to pass a car in our lane. A good thing too. I came around one corner and saw a bike cartwheeling down the road toward me. That’s how hard it hit the gaurdrail.
The lucky son of a bitch slid under the guardrail and walked away a only little banged up. He should be daed.
What happened was the curve tightened up and he eventually ran out of ground clearance. The exhaust pipe dug into the road and the bike slid out from under him when he tried that little extra lean when a Caddy was coming at him in the other lane.
20 minutes later we are peacefully sitting on the side of the road waiting for a tow truck when the first EMS dude showed up. WTF? There was a call into 911 saying there was a multi bike accident and bodies were lying in the road. Again WTF? As fate would have it that Sunday afternoon the local fire department was having a clam bake at the fire hall. EVERYBODY showed up. We had two fire engines, two abulances, the heavy rescue truck and three different cops. I’m greatful for the response but wow was it overkill.
One smashed to shit bike, a bruised ego and I changed my riding habits for good.
Mr. Goob, yours is a cautionary tale. I’m sure the reason the bus showed up, is that statistically, what happened to your friend was a freak accident, where he didn’t get redistributed all over the road.
We in the biz don’t call them donorcycles for nothing.
A motorcycle leaves you hanging out in the dangerous air and makes you invisible. If you talk to an automobile driver, who has just hit a bike she/he will tell you they never saw it.
My brother was riding down a straight, flat road in the middle of a Southern California day with his light on. An on-coming car turned left right over him. He had only a badly broken leg, but it could have been me saying good bye to another brother. The bike was totaled, and I was glad.
He when out and bought a bigger bike with the insurance money. :rolleyes:
I’ve chosen not to tell graphic trauma stories here, but I’ll say this, the most graphic were on donorcycles.
I watched a semi tractor smash into the rear of someone. I looked in my rearview mirror and said “oh boy, this is gonna be bad” then watched the impact. I stuck around until the police arrived to give my report.
Loads. Seven in Vietnam alone when I rode a motorcycle from Hanoi to Saigon. Two involved fatalities, but strangely the worst for me involved a guy riding a scooter right next to me who, when the truck in front of us stopped suddenly without brake lights, didn’t manage to stop in time (I came to a halt with my nose about an inch from the rear bumper - but I was wearing a helmet anyway). He went under the back of the truck, and scalped himself in the process.
When he came round, he just put his hand up, and casually plastered the flap of skin that was his scalp back on the top of his skull and rode off. It was almost like he’d done it before.