This afternoon we're driving home from one of our adventures and I'm waiting to make a left turn across a four lane highway. There is a left hand turn arrow so I'm actually waiting for it to turn green. I was going northbound and they have a green light and they are moving right along. 50-55 miles an hour easily. Cross traffic can make a right on red legally but doing it during the day when there is a lot of traffic is ill advised.
So I'm in the zone waiting for my light to turn and I hear the blast of an air horn. Right as I look over a fully loaded dump truck has locked up his brakes and is started to slide sideways and tip to the side. The reason for this is a small four door car made a turn on red and pulled out right in front of the truck. There is a car to the left of the dump truck and he is trying to move over to give the sliding truck room. There really isn't much room to move because of a concrete barrier that divides the highway. It was an incredible sight. My heart rate doubled and I was far enough away even if the truck flipped I was safe.
Smoke from the brakes and tires is billowing from underneath the truck. This is gonna be bad. The truck is tipping to the right while sliding left into the innocent car. The car that pulled out has no where to go and somehow this truck driver is threading his huge truck between these two cars. It will be a miracle if one or both of these little cars doesn't wind up crushed beneath this truck. Either way it's going to be very bad if either one of them even makes contact.
That fast it was over. The offending car quickly pulled into the first driveway it could after nearly causing the catastrophe. The truck driver some how kept control of the truck and straightened it out. The car on the left managed to get by before it was crushed against the concrete divider. The truck pulled right over onto the shoulder of the road and stopped. As the smoke cleared I could see he had put on his hazard lights. Just as my light turned green he had started to pull back out onto the road.
I wanted to go see if he was alright but he had already pulled away. I wasn't involved and I'm still having chest pains over the whole thing. I was witness to a combination of incredible driving, some good luck and what can only be described as a gift from above. Because there is no reason in the world why everyone should have been able to drive away from that intact.
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Definitely some divine intervention involved. That trucker had some serious stones too. i think I would have stayed on the shoulder for several minutes before I could think of putting it in gear (unless, of course, he pulled away to stalk the stupid car that started the whole thing).
ReplyDeleteGeorge once told me a story about a red sports car that made a u-turn from northbound to southbound 95, crossing all lanes, the grass median, and the southbound lanes as well.