Hey Everybody!! I'm back !
Well it's a new year, and time to gear up for another blog entry and podcast!! HAHA.... actually I'd like to create them more often, but I must tell you that 2006 was a trying year. I got the first omni show posted and running in mid February, and then on March 6th, it was about 9:45 pm as I traversed Columbia Missouri on my way to work. Unbeknownst to me (yes I truly believe that is an actual word) perhaps a mile or so ahead of me was a drunk driver. The alcohol finally dulls what is left of his senses, and his vehicle drifts to the left and off the highway into the soft, rain soaked soil in the median. Unfortunately, as his vehicle is about to leave the pavement, the right front of his van clips the beginning of the upcoming guardrail. If you have ever noticed, the first 30 feet or so of guardrail, with the yellow and black striped reflective tape on the end cap, is put in place with wooden pilings, these wooden pilings are drilled through in at least one spot to weaken them. Incase something collides with that portion or rail, the wood will break away and absorb some, but not all, of the impact. If steel pilings were used on this end portion, any vehicle hitting the end would stop almost immediately and increase the chances of injury. Since his vehicle just barely clipped the end it absorbed enough energy to break the wooden pilings, sending the drunk and his van off to the left into the median, and causing the 30 feet of steel guardrail to bend at a nice 90 degree angle to the right, directly into the path of the next oncoming car...... ME. Let me just add my $.02 here about the reflectors on highway guardrails...... they are faced along the long axis of the rail.... meaning, at night you can see them reflecting your headlights as long as you are looking at them parallel to the normal orientation of the rail.... looking at it from 90 degrees, the reflectors are no longer facing you, but instead facing off directly to the right or left. So my view of the rail as I was bearing down onto it at 60 mph was just brown, dull, dirty steel. I really didn't see it until my headlights fell upon the cold section stretched out across my path. I don't normally drive in the left lane, but at this section of highway, there is an onramp and a merge lane for vehicles getting onto the highway, and a large semi-truck and trailer was signalling to get on, so I changed lanes to the left and was slowly passing the accellerating truck, when the guardrail came into view... I can clearly remember seeing it and wondering to myself..."why the heck is that THERE, and then POW.... well I hit it, apparantly the impact ripped the section of guardral from the rest of the good guardrail still standing in place. I can remember being airborne for an instant, hitting the pavement and the car skidding 180 degrees and coming to rest still in the left lane , the passenger door up against the guardrail perhaps 150 feet past the point of impact. As it turns out there was already some passing motorists going northbound that had stopped to assist the drunk driver off in the median, they were unaware that there was a lane blocked with broken and bend section on the other side....so after I hit and came to rest....they ran over to assist me. I called into work, to let them know my situation. I've always felt that in the face of any type of adverse event, that it helps to do something normal, some mundane task that you do when things are normal and as they should be.... so after all the reports were taken and I was able to leave the scene, the plant manager at work graciously drove out to pick me up and give me a ride back home, but I thought the best thing for me to do, to keep sane and get things back to normal as soon as possible, would be to just go on in to work , and that is what I did.... I finished out the rest of the work shift, and thanks to a great friend at work, Patty, she graciously loaned me one of her cars for over a week, and I'm not sure how I would have coped with continuing with work and finding a new car, had it not been for her generosity, Thank you Patty!! As a side note, just a few days ago I received a notification from the county prosecutor, the driver of the van that went off the road was a repeat DWI offender, this was his third offense. He is doing time right now, at some correctional institution in Missouri, and will probably never legally be able to drive again in his lifetime. We can only hope.... Coming up next...... continued re-cap of the events of 2006, and a primer for The Omni Show, episode 2 !
posted by Pete @ 7:19 PM
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