12.18.2006

Driving me crazy

... So I was greeted when I arrived at the office this morning with a photo of an ugly rollover crash earlier this morning and a note attached instructing me to get some information about the crash ...

Ok.

... A couple hours later I was called out to a rollover crash in a neighborhood just a few blocks from our office. A few minutes later, I was pulling up to the crash, parking my car and walking down the middle of the street amid a stream of emergency vehicles and flashing lights ...

A Chevy Blazer was lying on its crushed roof and nearly a dozen firefighters were crowding around the vehicle trying to free whoever was inside. And an unoccupied pickup was sitting on the sidewalk just a few feet from the Blazer ... We were told a helicopter was on its way to take the person to a hospital, but looking at the Blazer I figured for sure the person was dead.

But 10 minutes later, firefighters wheeled a stretcher up to the vehicle and a few of them ushered out a woman who somehow was talking and moving ... Then just as I was leaving I noticed a police officer pull a middle-aged man from the back seat of a squad car and begin leading him through sobriety tests. Turns out the man was driving a borrowed pickup and ran a stop sign, hitting the driver's side of the Blazer and flipping it on its roof ... He was indeed drunk. At 10 in the morning.

But it didn't stop there.

As I headed back to the office, I was stopped at a major intersection in the city and watched as one, two, three cars made right turns and, rather than staying in their designated lane, made wide turns and veered into the other lane. In the process, the third car cut off and nearly sideswiped another car turning onto the street... I hate it when people do that ...

I'm still not done.

Now, I'm at a stop sign just outside our office and there's another compact car with the right-of-way. But before the driver can proceed forward, a fat SUV pulls up on her right -- this is a single lane road -- does a rolling stop and proceeds through the intersection, cutting off the woman as she starts to pull forward ... Ugh.

Now back to that photo that greeted me this morning ... I learned a young man was driving from a party -- where they'd been drinking -- with his fiancee and the vehicle veered off the road, hit a utility pole and flipped on its roof, coming to a stop in the middle of an intersection. With a bloody lip, the driver immediately got out of the vehicle and apparently was hysterical when police showed up. As far as he could tell his fiancee was dead -- her body was in an unusual position and she wasn't responding ... Lucky for the guy, the woman actually survived, but her arm was crushed. And him? Yep. Arrested for drunken driving ...

C'mon people. Let's be smart out there ...

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