(N.B. While passing this freak accident, it appeared that no one was injured. I would not have posted this if I believed any party was)
Wordless Outtake: Ooops
– Posted on October 19, 2015
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Curbside Classics Archives
(N.B. While passing this freak accident, it appeared that no one was injured. I would not have posted this if I believed any party was)
Well Officer, there I was just minding my business, trying to get to grandma’s to rake her leaves and take out the trash when this squirrel comes out of nowhere…
Hopefully no one was injured .
I see a lot of these , where they are no center dividers to drift into .
I always wonder what happened .
-Nate
Typical young Civic driver, thinking their car is a super performance car, when it’s just an anemic econobox.
See that stupidity, all the time… But as long as they or no innocent bystanders were hurt. That’s what matters.
Btw, Brendan… What does N.B. stand for?
Not all Civics are anaemic, although this looks like a base coupe. Uhhh, wouldn’t say the driver looks that young though.
N.B. This stands for “nota bene”. It means ‘note well’ and it basically is to call attention to the importance of a sentence/note, generally placed at the end of a piece of writing. I use it sometimes too because it sounds less hokey than “P.S”
Yes, the Civic Sis and swapped Civics are quick(had one)… But 75% of the ones who drive like Fast & Furious wannabes are stock, anemic, who have no regard for traffic rules.
Thanks, for the shorthand lesson, Will… Thought, N.B. meant “news bulletin” or something?
We use lots of Latin abbreviations w/o thinking about it, like et al., i.e., e.g., vs., A.M., etc. A holdover from medieval scholarship, when Latin was the written language all literate people had in common.
I think this one is a sedan. Which means a slushbox is imminent. Anemia…all you can handle.
The driver looks a least 50 years old to me. Guess it depends on your definition of “young”.
I was thinking the same thing. That driver doesn’t look all that young to me (and the car looks to be absolutely stock).
But if people want to call 50-something drivers “young,” I’m certainly not going to argue.
It didn’t say who was the driver in the article… For all we know the driver, was taken by ambulance or driven away by a friend.
Which was my first assessment of the pic.
That guy in the pic with the officer, to me, looks like a tow truck driver or plain clothes detective… Who knows?
“N.B” means “My mom was a school teacher” 🙂
It strikes me that you really have to be trying to flip one of these, either that or the tire pressures are messed up in some way that indicates ignoring them for a long time.
Or, I just remembered you’re in the same area that’s been having a cold blast, he hit a patch of black ice.
Ralph Nader would have a field day if he were alive today with this, Think sequel “Unsafe in Any Century”.
Normally it’s pretty hard to roll a Civic, but I’ve given up trying to infer how an accident occurred merely from where the vehicles came to rest; pretty wild stuff can happen. Once I saw an Aerostar on its roof, which is less surprising.
A good forum question is, “How many accidents have you witnessed?” I’m certain I’ve seen two.
Two??
You must not spend much time on the roads. I’ve seen too many to count…seen a few dead bodies on the road too. Body parts as well. Seen a car roll hard enough to squirt the people out the side windows. It is a weird sight. Seen helicopters come down right in front of my motorcycle to pick up the riders of the bikes in front of me that wiped out. Seen bodies tumble down the road right beside my left foot as I braked hard on my Harley. Seen a body fly over my head. Seen a motorcycle do cartwheels down the highway right in front of me. Seen an oncoming suburban go airborn right in front of me and watch it land on its roof in my rear view mirror. THAT one made me pull over and wait for my limbs to quit shaking. I sat on the ground unable to stand for 20 minutes. They say when a man dies he goes through a set of stages…don’t remember them all…anger, denial, etc, then finally acceptance. When that SUV came at me in the air, I literally went through every stage and then acceptance…all in a fraction of a second.
I thought I was dead.
That one second of time went by so slow it seemed like 5 minutes and I’m not exaggerating. It missed me by about 3 foot I think. Sounds like a lot but believe me, when you have an air born SUV coming straight at your motorcycle, 3 foot feels like 3 millimeters. When you accept death and it does not come, it messes with your head a little.
jeez, stereotype much?
Anemic econobox??? Tell that to the boss Mustang driver who just got smoked in a stoplight showdown! JS
Uh, Ooooohh Kkkaaayy?
No idea what you’re talking about.
Texting.
New Orleans has a causeway over Lake Pontchartrain. Twenty-four miles long, two narrow lanes, no emergency lane. Yet, I have seen people with their heads down texting while they drive over the lake. The number of cars jumping the railing into the lake has grown in the last few years. The suspect is driver distraction (i.e.: texting).
http://photos.nola.com/tpphotos/2013/10/vehicle_from_causeway_accident_1.html
Those kind of bridges as well as regular freeway overpasses are part of what convinced me to stop riding motorcycles some years ago. I started to find myself having serious difficulty in avoiding thinking about what happens if I somehow were to drift or be accidentally or otherwise pushed into one while on a motorcycle. Many of the “barriers” are simply too low.
I was passing an 18 wheeler and the tire blew out and flew apart just as I was next to it. BANG! Big hunks of rubber bounced off the car and windshield, first thought was, if I had been on my bike…
Saw something similar coming out of Monterey back in ’93. A young guy in an old Accord coupe off in the distance and headed in the opposite direction, somehow got into the median, kicked up a bunch of desert, and rolled at least twice before ending up partially in the fast lane on my side of the highway. By the time I got there, he was out of the car, walking around and, as you might imagine, looking a bit dazed.
I’ve been to California & driven down I-5 only once, and on those few hundred kms I saw cars running off the asphalt TWICE (nobody was hurt). Is driving down a motorway that boring?
I-5 through central California certainly is, I’ve driven that route dozens or probably around a hundred times over the years (SF-LA and/or back) and it is rare to NOT see at least one rollover or remnants thereof especially around a holiday weekend. I sense it was worse when the speed limits were lower as it was even more boring and mind numbing then.
On my 1st visit to Germany I saw, in a short time, 3 Mercedes in post-accident postures; one was into the weeds, another perpendicular to the median, and I forget the 3rd. This initiated my impression that Germans do not drive with much safety margin.
Typical. Gladly I haven’t seen a lot of accident scenes lately but I remember crash scenes on German motorways some 15-20 years ago, when I was small, always involving at least one Mercedes, which almost always would be the one car dented on the front. Coincidence?
Every day I can keep the roof of my car off of the ground is a good day.
Evidently, the shiny side is supposed to point up.
That’s one CCer who won’t be complaining that his A-pillars are too thick.
Wheels up!
RE : single vehicle accidents .
Most of the time it is caused my the driver veering into the center divider then over correcting as they try to get back to pavement .
The whys and what’s of going into the median vary all over the map , often distracted driving (texting etc.) , some times a sudden swerve to avoid another driver’s mistake or coming into your lane etc.
Is it the Civic being hated here or young men ? .
-Nate
Around here, the probable cause would be deer…
I’ll grant that as a good reason to own a pickup or SUV. Texas, for example, has lots of deer in its Hill Country, as we found out while driving thru it overnight.
A quick swerve for some reason or another and suddenly you find your sub par driving skills arent helped by slush grade japanese suspension tuning.
Seeing the “torn up” grass on the edge of the road leads me to believe this car ran off the side of the road. That idea is re-inforced by the lack of lane striping and no visible “rumble-strip” between the car and the edge of the road.
We’ll never know for sure, but I’m guessing he ran onto the soft shoulder and over-compensated, building up that wedge of dirty kinda like a big foot reaching out to trip you as you run down the hall. Frequently happens when the driver gets sleepy or distracted.
Rant on:
Proper recovery from shoulder drop-offs are not taught by 90% of North American driving schools.
Rant off.
You mean it’s not “yank the wheel hard to get back on the pavement as soon as possible”?
Running off the shoulder looks like a good analysis but wouldn’t the car be a little farther down the road if it had enough speed to flip?
Here is an off the wall possibility: Perhaps it was on a trailer, was not properly secured, and fell off.
“I hate it when that happens!”
A.) We don’t know if shaved head and shorts is the driver
B.) We don’t know how this happened
C.) I’ve witnessed 2 accidents that I wasn’t in. Neither one was serious.
Agreed. Too many unknowns; too many assumptions.
There are a number of things here that are being overlooked.
This wreck was in a work zone, as evidenced by the cone seen in the right center of the picture. That being the case, one should not expect striping, rumblestrips, and likely any type of median protection. Striping is done upon completion of the project (although there are temporary provisions for delineation with reflective tabs) and rumble strips are milled in prior to striping.
With this being a work zone, odds are decent that there was a sudden decrease in speed and the driver was not paying attention. Edge drop-offs are typical during an overlay such as this as the edge is built up to the elevation of the pavement after the overlay and prior to striping. And discussing what the guy was driving, and how easy it can or cannot be flipped, is utterly pointless. Any car can be wrecked and any driver can have his head up his ass while in a work zone.
The bigger issue is the driver was not paying attention when people were standing on the roadway working. He could have killed them or maimed them quite easily. That is the biggest issue I see in this picture.
I’ve been in many such work zones in my time. I would encourage anyone to experience this as it puts everything in a vastly different perspective.
Maybe the cone was placed there as a result of the accident, to close the lane? That was my take on it. But I may be wrong. But Brendan should be able to tell us.
It could be. I was also noticing the lack of oxidation on the surface and what appears to be a cold joint right behind the cop.
The upside of this picture is the outstanding colors of the foliage!
The cones were there to block off the lane. A firetruck and ambulance were parked just ahead of it in the left lane.
That highway looks very familiar.
Was that after the Sagamore Bridge, going to the Cape, Brendan?
The side of the car we see (the drivers side) seems undamaged, so I guess that it rolled over the other side. This seems curious to me.
One byproduct of having a car that is almost 80 in wide is that you naturally slow down in work zones…visually it feels like you will sideswipe the construction site if you don’t!
As annoying as the superthick A- and B-pillars in new cars can be, photos like this one make me glad they’re there.
Id rather have the rollbar like in my Wranglers. My CJs had them too, but the windshield spreaders do stiffen things up a bit.
“Well, officer. I came down this road at about 55 mph. Suddenly, a rabbit came out of nowhere in my path. I stepped on the brakes hard and turned the steering wheel left. I then tumbled about 5 and a half times and stopped while upside down. Right then I lost control of my vehicle…..”
Boy, Officer. I”m sure glad I wasn’t driving my 1970 Datsun Sports 1600 Roadster today!
Hahahaha.
It has been a long time…more than a quarter century…since on a nice, dry, sunny day on California State Route 12 east of Fairfield, a straight two lane road, I was eastbound and encountered a westbound two-door sporty coupe, of what make I am not sure, only that it was Japanese. We passed each other and continued on our way. I don’t know why but I glanced up at the rear view mirror in time to see that coupe flip over, end over end. I quickly turned around and went back to find it on the side of the road, upside down, its forward roof crushed; obviously totaled. The driver was already crawling out from where there was once a rear window. He said he wasn’t hurt (seat belts), and didn’t know why he had crashed. Assuring me that he needed no medical help, he asked me to go and call for help (this being the pre-cellphone era). The nearest phone was in a house by the roadside about a mlle away; the help was the California Highway Patrol. I did not go back to the scene and never heard anything more about it.
My guess would be that he had fallen asleep.
It perplexes me how one gets a car to flip end over end. Rollovers like the one pictured, I can understand, but how do you get the thing to pivot over the nose without a very peculiar obstacle being involved?
A weekly sight on our local interstate. The robotic GPS-guided tourist drivers hear “get in left/right lane” from the dash mounted sqwalkbox, and they immediately obey…without even looking for traffic first, resulting in another driver being cut-off and overreacting, getting his car sideways. Once that car hits the cabbage on the edge of the blacktop, that’s all she wrote. Over it goes. I find it amazing that even with cars being much bigger and heavier, their rollover resistance is actually less than vehicles from 15-20 years ago. It’s no wonder they need all those side & roof mounted airbags.
YouTube Russian dash cam videos are highly instructive as to the many creative ways drivers mess up.
Rampart…this is County 51. We have a male, 26 years of age, who appears to have been drinking…