Thanksgiving...CRASH!

It was a calm, peaceful morning. I was in my living room leisurely doing my Bible study (Joel) and sipping on a cup of strong coffee. Ahhhh....

SUDDENLY there was a tremendous CLAP!! Wow. What was that? It sounded like someone had slammed a metal lid on a large industrial-sized trash container. Stupid people I thought, and went back to my reading. (It didn't occur to me that commercial trash containers now use plastic tops.)

Then came the sirens. First it was one, short and nearby. Then a growing cascade of others mourning increasingly louder as they approached. When they abruptly trailed off like someone choked them, I knew something was going on nearby.

Urgently, I pulled on some clothes and grabbed my camera, phone, keys and headed out. When I reached the front door, I encountered a street full of emergency vehicles: police cars, fire truck, ambulance, and a gray car missing its front end and pointing in the wrong direction.

The crash scene from the front door of my building.

A closer view from the walkway of my building.

I was relieved and rather surprised to see that the driver appeared to have survived, She seemed to be in pretty solid shape considering she had just driven her car  at (40 mph (at least) into a pole. The air bags and the seat belt kept her in the car. She was sitting up in the driver's seat, half out of the car. The police and fireman milled about rather casually I thought. The EMTs dived in and went to work. One policeman was taking pictures of the scene. I consciously tried not to get in the way and out of any pictures. Meanwhile, I tried to snap a few shots of my own.

The engineer in me began to evaluate the scene. The car obviously failed to maneuver the bend in the road. Tire tracks in the snow, about a foot or less from the street, led right to the utility pole. There were no skid marks. It appears that the passenger side of the car hit the pole dead on. The pole didn't yield but the front end of the car shattered all over our front yard.  The shock of hitting the pole caused the car to arc about 230 degrees so that it was almost facing the opposite direction. Thankfully, no other vehicles were involved.

The pole held but is severely cracked.

A gap of ~3 inches from the force of the impact.

Several people I chatted with later assumed that the driver must have been on the phone or texting (an unfortunate testament to the effective propaganda campaign against cell phones). Perhaps...but maybe not. The accident also could have been due to excessive speed which caused the driver to fail to navigate the curve. There are no warning signs that a sharp curve exists (see picture below). Another factor is that the road is a tight four lanes without much room for error. I hope the young lady will survive to remember this day and count her blessings every day from now on. Thanksgiving indeed.

A tight curve. The winning pole is at the left.

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UPDATE:

The day after the accident, the pole was "repaired" (see pictures below). I don't know if this is a "permanent" repair or merely "temporary" until the warmer season comes around again.

Repaired (12/07/2014)

Repaired-opposite side (12/07/2014)

The "fix" consists of a supporting board on the cracked side of the pole (see picture at left-above). The board is secured to the pole via four (4) bolts all the way through the pole; the damaged shields for the power cables and ground wires were patched with a green plastic sheet (see picture at right-above).

View approaching pole (12/07/2014)

This picture (above) gives a better perspective of what a driver sees at the start of the curve. With snow (as of the day of the accident), the edge of the road would not be as apparent as this picture indicates.

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Written Th 27 November 2014
Updated Sun 7 December 2014 for pictures & text of repairs.