Woah, Just Heard a Car Accident

Here I was, lazing on the recliner, listening to clips on iTunes (70s 80s 90s stuff I heard in my childhood for reminiscing purposes) and all of a sudden I hear screeching of tires and a loud crash. It sounds like it was right down the street. I go outside armed with my cellphone in case someone needs help, but I can’t see where the accident was. I hear someone screaming “HELP!!!” over and over. Then I hear another voice, calmer. I can’t make out what he is saying. Still can’t see the accident but deduce it is in the intersection of the main road and the road my street is off of. This guy is just screaming in a horrified voice, HELP!" I can’t see anything and my area has no streetlights and no sidewalks (just a ditch, which I’ve almost ran my car into already) that goes to the main road so I can’t see if I need to help, but after a minute I hear sirens in the distance. I normally don’t go outside for sirens and stuff, but I heard the crash and it sounded like it was a few houses down. Definitely sad - hope everyone is okay. That guy’s screams will haunt me for a bit.

Car accidents terrify me. I’ve been in one - my friend was driving and we got t-boned. We were okay, my knees were black and blue from slamming the dash and my ponytail flew out, he had a scrape from the airbag and we were both sore as hell, but the van suffered a much worse fate. But it’s just so scary - I saw that SUV coming at us like it was in slo-mo. It’s so surreal. Whenever I pass one on the highway, especially the horrible looking ones on 70 going to and from school, I just get sick to my stomach. I’ve seen some bad remnants.

Sometimes I really hate cars. People don’t pay enough attention. Cars are so ‘normal’ that most people don’t think much about getting in and driving, but it’s like commanding a loaded weapon. A split second of stupidity can take away lives.

Any car accident stories? Yours, others, what you’ve seen?

People used to get into all kinds of accidents directly in front of my house. Usually it was only something along the lines of crashing into my across-the-street neighbor’s fence and taking off, but there were a few other interesting ones that I was present for:

  1. Roads are icy. Lady crashes through our fence, into our yard, and almost into our inground swimming pool. Thankfully, a large tree prevented her from actually entering the pool. The tree was knocked down, which we were somewhat thankful for, as it always sheds its leaves directly into our pool. She was okay.

  2. Raining. A boy a went to highschool with crashed his mom’s SUV into our yard and into a tree. pic. Interesting, the SUV came into our yard from the direction it ended up pointing in. Not sure how that happened. The kid was also okay, and his main concern was where the roses he was taking to his girlfriend ended up.

  3. Raining. Drunk guy ends up in our front yard, and spins so his car is pointing to the road. Tries to take off, but his car is stuck on the very large decorative rocks we’ve placed in the yard to prevent someone from ending up in our living room. He ends up just splattering mud all over the front of our house. He’s fine, cops are called, he’s obviously arrested. After the car was towed off, I laughed: his license plate was sitting on our front porch.

  4. Clear conditions. A guy in a station wagon rear ends the person in front of him at low speed. In the car are his wife and several small children, who are very shaken up. Kids are crying, and wife is verbally and physically assaulting her husband for being an idiot (I don’t blame her). I brought some cookies and fruit punch out for the kids, who quickly cheered up.
    I’ve also witnessed a slew of other accidents that were not in front of my house. Two memorable ones were:

  5. It’s raining and I’m in the middle of the circle (or round-about, whatever you’d like to call it). I hear tires squeal, then the crash behind me. I pull out of the circle into a patch of empty land. Seconds later another car enters the circle, and the two cars that were behind me end up getting pushed into the car that was in front of me. Again, everyone was okay somehow.

  6. This one was only a few weeks ago. I stopped at a light, two lanes. Two cars in the left lane, and I’m in the right lane with a pickup truck in front of me. The lanes merge into one right past the intersection, so when the light turns green, the truck in front of me moves off the line fairly fast (but reasonably so) onto to T-bone a van/SUV thing who was on the other side of the intersetion, making a left without yielding. Get out to make sure everything is ok: the driver of the minivan is a 17 year old boy who says he just got his license two weeks ago. The van is full of crying teenaged girls and apparently the boy was holding a milkshake at the time of impact, as it ended up all over the windshield. His vehicle (a chevy venture) was CREAMED. I’d hate to see what would have happened if it was actually a high-speed incident.

I’ve been in the car when it was t-boned by an SUV - which came away quite fine, thank you very much. Big mutha of a Pajero t-bones a much smaller, lighter Subaru Forester and the Forester is out of commission for something like three months - mainly because it was still quite new to the country and parts needed to be imported.

Pardon my profanity, but I fucking hate driving! Twice in the last five years I’ve been rear-ended by another driver (with the latter resulting in permenant injury).

I swear, it’s like running an obstacle course every time I leave my house. People running red lights, people changing lanes without looking, people darting out of driveways in front of me . . . Perhaps my perception has been heightened because of what happened to me, but I think people are nuts.

I was doing 40 in a pickup truck, when a guy in a '79 Civic (tiny car) made a left in front of me. I’ll never forget the look of horror on his wife’s face, as from her seat on the passenger’s side, she saw me bearing down on her. I T-boned him, but I had time to move the truck to my right about a foot, according to the skidmarks. I hit the Civic about a foot in front of the passenger’s door, where his wife was sitting. It probably saved her life, but she still spent 3 weeks in the hospital.

I was in a bar on Georgia Avenue in DC in when a guy doing about 70 hit another car, doing probably 35, head on. He was walking around in a daze, but his wife was trapped in the car, in bad shape. Another guy and I forced her door partway open, and I cleared out her airpipe, then held her upright and waited for the resuce squad to get the Jaws of Life on the scene, which took a painfully long time. Frustrated, I left, and let a fireman tend to her. She didn’t make it.

I was driving home late at night when I found a car upside-down, with the roof flattened, next to the highway. A cop drove by, and I flagged him down, then I left, since there was nothing I could do. I don’t know if the guy survived.

My nephew, a great kid, ran a stop sign at age 17, was t-boned by a car going 50, and was killed instantly. He was a very respnosible 17 year-old, but one mistake was all it took to kill him.

When I lived 100 yards off of the interstate, I’d wake up about twice a year to the sound of a high-speed accident. I’d call the cops, and the cops would almost always get to the scene before I could. Eventually I got so I would just call the cops and go back to sleep.

I used to commute every day on Malibu Canyon Road, one of the main routes between the San Fernando Valley and the beach. (Note resemblance to the Bolivian Death Road.) It’s a narrow two lanes but with fairly gentle curves, so you can easily get up to 60+ MPH if you’re lucky not to get stuck behind some slowpoke.

I’m driving home around 2 a.m., when a drunk driver suddenly loses control and slams head-on into the vehicle two cars ahead of me. I came around the corner just in time to see Car #1 smashed up in the center of the highway, while Car #2 tumbles over the edge of a 200 foot cliff. :eek:

Luckily, Car #2 slides only 30 feet or so, and stops. The car between me and Car #1, who (I think) wasn’t hit, does a quick 180 turn and speeds back towards Malibu, presumably to call 911 (this was before cell phones existed) or perhaps they were Mexicans fearing deportation, I have no idea which. So now it’s just me and these two bashed-up cars, in the middle of a narrow canyon road. In the dark.

The driver stumbles out of Car #1 – he’s visibly shaken, but doesn’t have a scratch on him. Pretty amazing, since the whole front of his car is demolished, looking like the aftermath of a NASCAR driver who T-boned the wall at Daytona.

The guy asks me: “What happened?”
“You’re in a car accident.”
“Am I okay?”
“You look fine. Were you wearing a seat belt?”
“Yes.”
“Saved your fuckin’ life, pal.”
“No, seriously. Am I okay? Am I bleeding anywhere?”
“Nope.”
“I feel like my face is covered in blood.”

Another car approaches, I flag them down. Tell them what happened, and how I think somebody’s already calling 911, but I’m not sure. So they drive on to find a pay phone. This is the moment when I realize I’m still wearing my security guard uniform, so everyone’s looking to me for direction. I decide to pretend as if I’m taking command, even though I don’t have a fucking clue what to do.

I tell the driver: “Maybe you should lie down or something.”
“No, I’m afraid if I lie down, I’ll pass out.”
“Umm…okay. Why don’t you direct traffic, then?”

So while the shaky, battered, halfway-into-shock driver blearily directs cars & trucks around the wreck (not many that late at night) I decide to check out Car #2. The second driver’s unconscious, but can’t see broken bones or blood or anything. I start climbing down the steep embankment, but after just a few steps the loose gravel starts crumbling away, and the car SHIFTS and slides a few more inches down the ravine. I think for a moment and decide, if the car plummets all the way down the canyon, even if I’m trying to help him, that’s probably the type of thing that would weigh heavy on my conscience later, no matter how cool it would initially look. (Hey, I was 18 and a heavy metal fan, that’s how my thinking went back then.)

So I climbed back out of the canyon, and pretty soon a couple off-duty cops stopped by, followed shortly by regular fire trucks & paramedics. They went through the whole process of getting the guy out of Car #2 – the firemen had the same problem as I did with the car shifting, so they had to secure it by rope before they could even reach the door. It was all very surreal, like an episode of Emergency! unfolding before my eyes. One thing that surprised me was how the rescue personnel kept yelling at the second driver, even though he was knocked out cold. I didn’t know that rescue workers yelled at unconscious people.

Me & driver #1 helped out, though there wasn’t much for us to do. We did help lift the injured driver into the ambulance. At which point, one of the EMT’s said, “Hey, wait a second. Where’s the other driver?”

I pointed to the guy and said, “That’s him.”

The EMT took one look in the guy’s eyes and said, “Whoa, hold on everyone. We may have a second injury here.” (Oops.)

At that point, one of the cops took me aside and took my statement (I didn’t really see much except the aftermath), the ambulances left and the tow trucks arrived, and I went home. A few days later, I found out that driver #2 had died at the hospital. :frowning: Driver #1 was okay, though.

Anyway, that’s my one big accident story. (Perhaps later I’ll talk about the car that flipped over on the freeway and caught fire, but there wasn’t much to do about that one…)

One a friend was involved in:

My friend has a PhD in agricultural engineering and works at a local university. Since his research labs are fruit fields strewn all over Spain, often in remote-ish locations, he owns both a large 4x4 and a subscription with the dealership’s mechanic :slight_smile: One Friday he was on the highway (speed limit 120, all the speeds I list are in km/h) heading home with a coworker, doing 160, this was before the new “points license” which has reminded people of the existence of brakes, and gets passed by a red streak going so fast that his identification of it as a Porsche was just an unconfirmed WAG.

About five minutes later, he sees a black column up rising up ahead, as of a fire starting.

Turns out that yep, it was a Porsche. Which its owner had just picked up from the dealership and proceeded to Step On It, Baby - until the poor car had just blown something somewhere and caught fire. The driver and copilot were dazed but able to leave the car on their own and didn’t manage to get run over. My friend figured that his puny extinguisher wasn’t going to be able to do much, so he sent his coworker further back to signal drivers while he checked out the couple for injuries and called emergency. No serious injuries but every time my friend recounts it he says “that poor car! To fail in such inhuman hands!”

I have not witnessed any accidents except the one I was in (which was minor with no injuries) but I was very nearly killed by someone running a red light.

I was in Phoenix at a High School Journalism convention, and our group of 12 or so was crossing a busy street, to get to a mall. It must have been 8 or 10 lanes, and we were half way across one side when out of no where comes this red sports car, easily doing 50 MPH on a 35mph road. As he ran the red light, he sort of “split” our group; if you can imagine a few people ahead of the rest of us, the car whizzed by through the middle.

Now, I can not remember if I was the person two feet away as that car screamed past us, or if I was right behind the person that was that close. It happened so fast, and my memory in those kind of situations is unreliable. Sometimes, the whole thing plays back in my head and I imagine what would happen If I had been killed. Really freaks me out.

I just wanted clarification on this statement.

The only mariginally remarkable accident I witnessed was due to stupidity of the driver. I guy driving a Jeep Wrangler was towing a huge trailer at 80+MPH. The trailer was way too big for that vehicle and he was driving too fast to be pulling any trailer. I was doing about 70MPH when this guy whips around me. As he pulled back in front of me, the trailer started wobbling back and forth. It got worse and worse until the trailer forced the Jeep off the road, where it rolled at least three times before coming to a stop. The trailer parted company with the Jeep after the first roll. I was trying to watch both the Jeep and the trailer as I slammed on the brakes so I’m not sure how many times each one rolled.

The guy was pretty lucky. He was shaken up and pretty beat up, but no broken bones. There wasn’t much left of the Jeep or the trailer though.

My hair was up in a tight ponytail, and the rubberband came almost completely off, from the force of my head moving I guess.

A couple years ago, my nephew was in a single-vehicle crash. He was driving on a dark and twisty country road when a vehicle comes at him with their brights on. He couldn’t see and felt his right wheel leave the road surface. He over-corrected and swerved out of control, went down an imbankment and smashed into a tree. It was only about a mile and a half from my house, and I got there well before the emergency workers. They cut him out of the car. His scalp was laid back so you could see his skull. The orbit of his eye was broken, his upper jaw was broken in three places. His right arm was broken, along with all the fingers on that arm. He had a hairline spinal fracture and tore his liver a bit. He had compound fractures in both legs.

He was life-flighted to Vanderbilt trauma center were he spent two weeks. When they put the rod in his left leg, they made it about 1/2 inch too long, so now everytime he moves the leg, the rod causes him a great deal of pain and has (according to the doctors) irreparably damaged the cartilege in his knee. The miss one fracture which healed wrong and may have to have his ankle fused. The doctors have said he’ll be in pain the rest of his life, which is a long time since he was only 23 when it happened. But he’s alive.

The folks at the accident said his 1980 Mercury Grand Marquis saved his life. A less solid car would’ve provided no protection at all.

StG

While that does make more sense, it is not nearly as entertaining as I had pictured.

That is what I figured you meant, but I was hoping maybe you had hair extensions and the whole thing flew off. [/hijack]

I’ve been in two this year, one where I overcorrected on San Francisquito Road and flipped my car. Broke my hand in a few places and totaled my POS Saturn that I paid nothing for and had 200k miles on it.

Last week some dumb…person in a luxury grade white American sedan didn’t see me in the left lane as I was trying to get past some trucks (I live by 2 distribution centers) and decided dart from between two of them to do the same. I saw her in time to hit the brakes and mostly avoid her, but we went tire to tire for a little while before I went off the freeway (yes, this was on the freeway, I was doing about 70). My car got a little cosmetic damage and I had to replace the front tires. She took off too quickly for me to get her plate #s. I hope she has more of a sore spot for cosmetic damage than I do (likely).

Last year around Christmastime my husband and I took off on the bike to go run some errands in town. A lady in an Excursion ran a stop sign and T-boned some guys in a late 70s-early 80s Nissan truck (you know the type, about as rugged as a soda can). Of course this accident would have to happen in the weird 100m or so radius of no Sprint service, so after quickly checking over the scene my husband got on the bike sans helmet and did about 90 to the airfield to call 911. Fortunately while he was doing that another car stopped and it happened to be the local fire chief.

I was helping the lady in the Excursion, who seemed a little out of it but mostly OK. I set her on my jacket and turned her car off. The other guys were in a pretty bad way, their little truck had flipped and the cab was completely crushed. The fire chief talked to them as best he could. They were eventually helo’d out. I hope they made it.

Mine’s here.

My hands are shaking from just reading about these!

My only accident was July 4, 1964, riding with a drunk brother-in-law, home on leave from the Army. While everyone in the car is screaming “Slow down!”, he makes a turn at 70 mph. We slide through a yard and up against a tree, on my side of the car. Got a broken rib – nobody else was hurt – until we got home and sister-in-law kicked brother-in-law’s butt.

Yesterday a guy in a pickup pulled out in front of me. I was just leaving town and not going very fast, but I still had to hit the brakes. I tooted at him. He stopped me a ways up the road to apologize profusely. He just didn’t see me.

I have no doubt that I’ll back into someone some day. The head rests on the back seat of my Camry totally block my view. I’d like to remove them.

Odd that this came up. I just got home from picking up food for Mrs. Small and her cow-orkers and I nearly witnessed two traffic accidents within an hour.

  1. I stopped at a liquor store/carry out I used to work at to buy some soda. The easiest way to get there from my house is to pull through the back lot and into the alley, then park. While on the road attached to the back lot, I could clearly see the intersection fo that street and a US 52. While I was in the back lot and attempting to make my way to the alley, as there was a little bit of traffic, I heard a lot of screeching and smashing, and when I came around to the front of the store, there were 3 cars in the middle of the highway that had been involved (or maybe 2 and one just stopped right behind, not too sure…)

By the time I came out of the store, there was already a state highway patrol and a police car. I stood for a second outside, talking to my old boss, and within minutes an ambulance pulled up. I was honestly suprised at the quickness of response.

  1. I love my neighborhood. There are a lot of bad areas in this town, and I am lucky enough to now live in a better area now. Most of my neighbors are older or retired, and usually it’s very quiet. After 9 or 10 at night, hardly anyone can be found outside, and it’s a lot better than at my old place where drunks would get in fistfights in our parking lot at all hours…

There is a slight problem though. There are 3 stop signs in this neighborhood, and I would say less than half the cars that come through here even pay attention to two of them. I watched a super-huge SUV almost get hit by a tiny Acura that ran the stop sign and not only miss seeing the SUV who stopped, waited, and was now going, but also didn’t see the police car behind the SUV at the other stop sign… :smack:

Brendon

A car with four teenagers hit a ~50 year-old guy in the rear next a gas station I was at about 2 months ago. The girls were really upset, and one wouldn’t stop crying. At least the air bags went off and everyone was walking. The hittee was remarkably calm about it. One of the girls was begging people not to call the police, but of course someone did, and a cycle cop arrived in a few minutes. I pointed out the “begger” to him as she quick-walked away from him, and he chased her down. I assume that they were uninsured, or illegal aliens, or the driver had been drinking, something like that. One guy said, “Or all three.” I left when the cops said they didn’t want to talk to me if I hadn’t actually seen the crash.