...I was a witness to that fact 2 1/2 hours ago.

At 6:10 PM (strange what sticks in your mind while frantically punching 911 on your cell phone) a lady in her 60's lost control of her small white hatchback, flew backward down a steep embankment, rolled 2 times, and came to rest on the passenger side on the edge of a dry creek bed. With the help of a couple of people who stopped and rushed to help, she was able to crawl out the rear of the hatchback and was taken away in an ambulance with what looked to be only a few minor scrapes and bruises.

It was one of those accidents that make you ask "What the HELL was she thinking!!??"

It's like this: she was behind me on a two lane secondary (tertiary?) road as we came to a sharp left-hand curve where the speed limit drops from 60 to 45. As I'm going around the curve, my peripheral vision catches something to my left and I realize she's passing me...on a curve...in a no passing zone...with an oncoming car right in front of her.

I think it was at this point she must have realized what she was attempting to do wasn't such a hot idea. She cut back to the right and clipped my left front with her right rear, causing her to loose control, spin around and leave the road hatchback end first. I think it was the barbed wire fence she hit after the second roll that saved her a third roll down the embankment and into the creek bed.

After seeing the gyrations her little car went through and what it looked like when the rolling stopped, I could not believe she wasn't in worse shape. Not sure if her airbag deployed, but no way would she have walked away from that if she wasn't wearing a seatbelt. I do wonder if she may have had some sort of head injury. I say that because several people who waited with her until the ambulance arrived later came over and told me she gave them two different stories on how the accident occurred. It changed from "I was in a hurry and lost control while trying to pass" to " Some guy cut me off and ran me off the road". :

The DPS trooper, after looking at both cars and the path she plowed down the embankment and through the fence, wrote up the accident the way I described it. He told me the physical evidence didn't support her version of the story and the report would reflect the accident was the result of her attempting to pass in an unsafe area.

I'm wired. Wonder how long it will take me to get to sleep tonight. Is there is a football game on the tube to distract me...

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Numbers is hard

OSU-Florida game is on

Go Gators!!

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Retired in 2006 at age 49.

"Who among us is smart enough to learn from the mistakes of others?" - Voltaire

So what you're saying is that seatbelts are reducing the pool of potential darwin award winners?

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Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful. Just another form of "buy low, sell high" for those who have trouble with things. This rule is not universal. Do not buy a 1973 Pinto because everyone else is afraid of it.

Holy cow. I am really glad you are OK.

You'll be running that one on lid movies for a few nights, I imagine. I have a way of stumbling on injury accidents for some reason and always stop to offer my assistance. From that and my old emergency room moonlighting days, it always amazed me how each accident has its detalied little differences that totally change the outcome. Maybe it's a seatbelt, maybe a haystack or even a ditch that saves someone from disaster, at least some of the time.

Give your wife and family an extra hug.

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Rich
San Francisco Area
ESR'd March 2010. FIRE'd January 2011.

As if you didn't know..If the above message contains medical content, it's NOT intended as advice, and may not be accurate, applicable or sufficient. Don't rely on it for any purpose. Consult your own doctor for all medical advice.

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Numbers is hard

Hope you don't hear from her insurance company / attorney dialing for dollars. Might be a good idea to write down everything you can remember while it is fresh.

Glad you, and everyone else, are OK. Could have been real bad from what you describe.

Doc, Charles...thanks.

And I did get the name/phone# of one of the guys who stopped. He didn't witness the accident but did hear the accident victim tell her first and second versions of the story.

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Numbers is hard

good move. you never know what someone might try to pull. you really are lucky to be alive. these people out there are just scarey. this is good reason to either never leave the house or only leave it in that 300 hp beemer i got my eye on. she never would have gotten that close to me. zoom zoom.

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"off with their heads"~~dr. joseph-ignace guillotin

"life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages."~~mark twain - letter to edward kimmitt 1901

My sister got hit in an intersection (in her little Geo) by a guy in a giant pickup truck. Little car did a 360 before it stopped -- everything in it flew out (apart from my sister who was belted in), and the car was totalled.

Mr. Pickup runs up to her window, where she's sitting in absolute shock, and the first words out of his mouth were "you know you ran that red light, don't you?"

Fortunately for my sister a woman driving behind the pickup knew that HE had run the red light. She stopped and gave him an absolute tongue-lashing, according to my sister... and his insurance paid for everything.

Seatbelts really DO save lives, but kind eyewitnesses are pretty great to have around too.

Wow RE, that's a scary thing to go through. Good man on getting the guys name and number that heard the different stories. Glad you're okay.

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Dogs aren't our whole lives, but they make our lives whole. - Roger Caras

I think he just did. :P

Isn't it amazing how that adrenalin gets you going? Glad you're OK. Also I hope your team won in that football game as well.

ReWahoo: I'm up and about early this A.M. (Got a few golf lessons
to teach down the hill).
Anyway, I tuned in to see if there were a few "chuckles" to start my day.

Your post wasn't funny! Don't know if calling you "lucky" is appropriate, but with that gal passing on a no passsing lane with another car heading her direction, you could have been involved a lot more than you were.

Anyway, glad you are o.k. (You don't want to spend any part of your
future 40 year retirement in the hospital because of a car accident). 8)

Re: Safety belts. Yeah, good idea.

Also, re: safety belts. When I was growing up, all a guy needed with a
large family was a p/up truck. General use for fishing, getting to work etc.

And the best part was when there was the Sunday (40 mile drive) to
grandma's house, loaded up all the kids and the dog in the bed of the p/up.

Plenty of room in the cab for his six-pac, and his wife.

Anyway, glad to hear you are O.K.

Buckle-up.

It is weird how you react in bad accidents. About 15 years ago I was on the NJ Turnpike (or 95 where it leaves the Bronx, somewhere along there) a few cars behind a pickup. I didn't see what caused the accident - just the commotion of cars heading every which way - but the pickup slammed into a cement underpass at about 70MPH. I pulled over and ran to the truck - a nurse beat me to it. She took one look at the passenger side guy and shook her head so I joined her on the driver's side and helped her stabilize the driver. He was bleeding and in shock but looked like he might live.

Another woman came up a started getting frantic about the passenger side guy who was literally seconds away from dead. She screamed for me to go find a belt to try to stop his bleeding - the nurse looked at me and rolled her eyes up so I just kept helping her.

The weird thing is that I had a belt on under my sweat shirt. It was my favorite cloth belt with little windsurfers on it -- I have never found another one like it. At any rate, I ran a whole evaluation around in my head about whether it would be worth ruining the belt to go through the motions of pretending to help a guy who was beyond helping. I ended up saving the belt - the guy was dead within seconds.

As soon as the EMTs got there I got out as fast as I could. Like ReW I was wired for hours. I felt pretty good about helping the nurse with the driver but second guessed my behavior re the belt for a long time -- should I run a poll

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Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre -- Albert Camus

REW,
Glad you're not hurt. For years I pooh-poohed seat belts. Not any more. Too many fools on the road. You're lucky and she's stupid and lucky.

And yep, the Gators ruled. The defensive end said (morning paper) "I don't want to be bragging, but we've played better teams that Ohio State."

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Resist much. Obey Little. . . . Ed Abbey

Disclaimer: My Posts are for my amusement only.

Eagle: Man, that was a complete butt-kicking that Florida put on Ohio State.

A lot different than last years Texas, USC game that ReWahoo nailed me on.

Puts a little doubt on the strength of the big 10, especially on the heels
of USC putting it to Michigan in the Rose Bowl.

Ohio State couldn't handle the speed, and either could Michigan.

Turns out I didn't have a lot of trouble getting to sleep. That game was over by the end of the half and sure didn't live up to the hype. It would have been a lot more interesting to have watched a rebroadcast last year's BCS Championship game.

I did, however, wake up at 3:30 and couldn't get back to sleep. Decided I might as well get up and get an early start cleaning up the front seat of my car. :P

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Numbers is hard

not to veer off rewahoo!'s thread (i know how he likes to stay on the road) but i think just dialing 911 is plenty heroic. i can't even imagine a scene with mangled bodies spewing blood. i avert my eyes from tv when pbs shows a lion making a kill.

without training, sounds like you were right to follow the nurse's lead. but if you're still thinking about that belt after all these years, i'd give the belt a proper burial and be done with it.

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"off with their heads"~~dr. joseph-ignace guillotin

"life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages."~~mark twain - letter to edward kimmitt 1901

Wow.......that was a close call............... Glad that you are ok, and if I am sure seat belts will be mandatory going forward in your car for all peopl eriding in it, right??

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Consult with your own advisor or representative. My thoughts should not be construed as investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results (love that one).......:)


This Thread is USELESS without pics.........:)

Glad you are OK Wahoo. When I got smacked good and hard a little over a year ago, it took a long time for my skipped heart beats to go away. I still feel differently about driving then I did before.

Ha

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"As a general rule, the more dangerous or inappropriate a conversation, the more interesting it is."-Scott Adams