The actions of both drivers were incredibly stupid. Here’s what happened:
I was about 15th in a line of cars sitting at a light. Construction is going on in the area, so the light is timed to only allow about a dozen cars through at a time.
The light changed, and about a dozen cars go through. A guy in a white mini-van initially started to run the light then screeched to a halt and backed up so that he was behind the cross walk. This wasn’t a problem as the driver behind him, a woman, also in a mini-van (purple) hadn’t gotten anywhere near the light yet. Ok here it comes…
I’m now third in line. The mini-vans are in the lane two my left, white van in first position, purple van in second position 5ft behind. That’s when I notice something; the white van is still in reverse!
I’m thinking: “well, it’s a long light, perhaps he’ll notice/remember. Oh, and surely the driver in the purple van back can tell she’s 5ft back.” (yes I routinely put too much faith in people)
The light changes: Purple van moves foward white van moves backwards, initially anyway. Crash! Amazingly no on in my lane moved. We must have all seen it coming.
I often almost witness accidents a lot. Here’s the trick to the “almost”: when you see someone doing something that you just know is going to cause an accident, call out, “Please don’t make me a witness!”.
I saw one between Saranac Lake NY and Lake Placid NY, it was interesting, 2 lanes, the car 2 ahead of me is driving normal when he suddenly veers off to the left, hits the guard rail, barely misses a minivan, loses his license plate on the ground along w/ several other chunks of his car. He is stopped, as is traffic for the moment. He is then facing the way he came but he doesn’t want to go that way, so he takes his crippled car and does a 180 in front of all these pissed off people and drives off the way he was going in the first place. Traffic went back to normal,
I turned around about 1/2 mi ahead and eased near where he hit. I picked up his plate, I dropped it off at the police station. Pretty cool.
In Illinois, at least, if you’re in Reverse, you’re automatically at fault. Doesn’t matter what the other guy was doing. So the White Van gets the ticket. Improper Lane Usage?
Or you could just put on your Peril Sensitive Sunglasses™.
Around 1984 I had a restored 1966 MGB that my mom had bought new. I was behind an El Camino at a stop sign. There was cross-traffic and she pulled into the west-bound lane when it was clear. I pulled up to the line. She waited for the east-bound lane to clear, but cars were starting to approach from the east; so she shifted into reverse and rapidly backed up… right into my nice chrome grille.
I was just thinking today about an accident I saw years ago. It was Memorial Day weekend, lots of traffic heading out of town while I was trying to get home from work. I’m on the interstate, four lanes eastbound at this point and there was on old wreck of an RV a couple of lanes over. It was pretty sorry looking but it was obviously somebody’s vacation-mobile. There was an older couple on board and they were looking forward to a nice holiday, I suppose.
Anyway, the traffic suddenly slows down, everyone starts to brake, and from the corner of my eye I see something go by too fast. It’s the RV. Grandpa’s pumping the brakes but they’re not working too well and he’s not slowing down much. I can tell by the look on his face that he knows he’s gonna rear-end somebody.
At this point I can see three things: 1) Grandpa’s right, there’s gonna be a collision. 2) Probably nobody’s gonna get hurt, although their weekend will be ruined. And 3) It’s far enough away from me that I’m not in any trouble.
I was right about the first two. The RV rear-ended the guy in front of him, but it was just a hard tap. But it’s only then that everybody else noticed there was a problem and they all start trying to get out of the way, even if they aren’t in the way! A zone of chaos erupts on the freeway and I’m right in the middle of it. Cars are changing lanes like mad, slowing down, speeding up, dodging left and right. Incredibly, no one else even touched bumpers.
I’ll always remember how bad I felt for that poor older couple – you know they were just trying to get away for a while on their limited budget. But I also remember that you can’t be too far away when an accident starts to happen.
The worst accident I ever saw… well, I didn’t see it. But I saw the aftermath. I had spent a couple days at some friends’ house in Las Vegas (friend always has these great three-day birthday bashes) and I was on my way home to Los Hideous. This would have been about two years and a day ago.
Traffic was frelling sacked starting on the uphill side past the state line and continued sackin’ down the other side for a couple/few miles. There were emergency vehicles everywhere. Bodies were strewn about like bodies. (They were under sheets.) From what I heard later, a family of ten was on their way to Vegas in a white van. The driver lost control, possibly because of a blowout, and crashed in the median. Several passengers were ejected and seven got dead.
As I passed within several yards of one of the bodies I thought about the over-100º heat, the ants and other insects that are everywhere in the desert, and the fact that the bodies would have to lay there cooking and being nibbled until the coroner got there. I don’t know where the coroner would have to come from, as I don’t know what the county is there. IIRC, it’s Kern county. That means the coroner may have had to come from Bakersfield, which has got to be about three or four hours away. And the bodies baked.
Come to think of it, I’ve seen a couple other accidents.
Several years ago I was at the MCAS El Toro airshow. Col. Caddick, commander of the 3rd MAW (IIRC) was flying a routine in an F/A-18. From my perspective it looked as if he was making a “square” loop; that is, a loop, but with 90º changes of direction at the corners. When he got to the top he seemed to “fall out” of the maneuver. He came down nose-first, eventually raising the nose well over the horizon. The nose was high and the afterburners were on full, but the heavy mass of metal continued its downward trajectory. It hit the ground tail-first, then slammed down on the nose. Col. Caddick was severely injured in the crash.
Video footage I saw on the news clearly showed what happened. It looked to me as if the pilot was supposed to make a normal loop. He pulled up too sharply at the beginning and lost his airspeed on the way up. When he got to the top his wings were “waffling”. He had stalled. He got the nose down to build up his airspeed. The nose was up and he had max thrust, but an F/A-18 grosses out at about 26 tons. It takes a while to overcome its inertia. I’ll bet if he had 100 or 200 more feet he would have made it. (The opinions stated are my own and are not meant to defame Col. Caddick.)
Two years later, MCAS El Toro again. A civilian pilot was flying his Korean War vintage F-86 when he got too low in a maneuver and struck the runway, exploding into a firey ball. The pilot suffered fatal injuries in the crash.
Several years earlier my dad was on duty (FAA) at Wm. J. Fox airfield in Lancaster, CA. He told me that Bill Barnes, son of the famous aviatrix Florence “Pancho” Barnes, would fly his P-51 Mustang in formation with an F4U Corsair and a B-29 past the airport. I hopped on my trysty Yamaha Enduro with my super-8 camera strapped to the back. As I approached the airport I saw a plume of black smoke rising from north of the airport (the FAA building was between me and the smoke). “That doesn’t look good,” I clearly remember thinking. When I got to the FSS the mood was somber. Dad told me that Bill had crashed. I’d just talked to Bill Barnes a few days before. I’ve heard two stories about the crash. The first was that an oil cooler line leading to the oil radiator below the cockpit burst and sprayed Bill with extremely hot oil, killing or incapacitating him. The second story was that Bill had had a heart attack at the controls. Either way, Bill and his mechanic who was in the back seat (where a fuel tank used to be) suffered fatal injuries in the crash.
The coolest accident I ever saw the aftermath of was about two years ago.
My friend Jon and I were cruisin down 435 east, right near Mission. Traffic started backing up bad, as far as we could see down the road. For about two miles, we crept along less than 5mph. Eventually the whole four lane highway was narrowed to a single lane, and we still couldn’t see anything. We got closer and closer and there were emergency vehicles everywhere, cops swarming around, blocking everything off. Then, we slowly crept by the scene.
There was a ‘pimp ride’ facing the wrong direction, with it’s nose in the center divider. Between it’s rear fender and the divider was a cop car, and against it’s other rear fender, sticking out across a lane, was a cop car, T-boned into the ghetto cruiser. It was G’d out, lowered, tassels, chrome everywhere.
There was a woman in the passenger seat bawling her eyes out, a man sitting on the bumper of an ambulance handcuffed, and a second man beside the cop car that T-boned him, being patted down.
The trunk of the vehicle was open with a trash bag inside full of what I’ve always assumed was marijuana. A huge copy-paper box was sitting beside the rear door of the G-ride, full of kilos upon kilos of soft white powder. There were bricks of coke laying around the box, hanging over the edge, and filling it to the brim.
I can only imagine the events that led up to a wreck like that. What a great movie it’d make.
How could you tell (or expect the purple van driver to tell) that the guy was still in reverse? You’d have to be remarkably observant or telepathic. Or did he have giant-sized fluorescent lettering on his shift panel?