Well, that's just not good enough, especially for a professional driver.
Mick Berg.
Well now you know why I got out of the transportation industry
But what do you want to do to him? Sentence him to death? Too late…
In the two years I drove I saw things that would probably scare you to death an not all at the behest of the "professional drivers" either.
I saw things that regular drivers did that was so absolutely stupid I was amazed that they had lived as long as they had. I saw things from all types of forms of transportation that would probably make a New York taxi driver blush.
And yes railroad engineers were among those.
I'll tell you a little story about how a rush to judgment can be wrong. Now this is liable will be a bit lengthy so bear with me I might even have to make an over two or three posts. But as I said many years ago I was driving over the road and I had loaded up in Hawthorne Nevada at the Naval weapons Center going to Norfolk Virginia to the shipyards. Now it doesn't matter what I had on, but it went bang :hehe:
Anyway I was coming southbound on some little Podunk Pennsylvania highway between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg and after all these years I don't remember the highway number but I can tell you the name of the town, it was New Buffalo Pennsylvania. It was a two lane with a turning lane in the middle and what I remember of that town was there was a big white house, sitting next to a used schoolbus lot and that was about it. That was on my right side as I was coming into town on the left side of the road was a little cable guardrail that dropped off into a river if I recall correctly.
I'm coming in to town at 55 mph and I looked up and saw a steel hauler coming the opposite direction probably doing about the same speed on the other side of town. In the driveway that White House was a 1992 Crown Victoria Ford that was white and it looked like an old lady was driving, she pulls out into the center turn lane heading towards me and in the same direction as the steel hauler.
Now this is where things started going in slow motion and I'll remember it to the day I die. The steel hauler saw her and got out of the throttle because I saw a puff of smoke out of the stacks and he moved over little bit and he was going to go on around her and she was going to then go into the lane and everything was going to be hunky-dory. This is where it turns south…
She waited till he was about 3 feet off her bumper and veered in front of him and at this point it was like the opening scene to the original Beverly Hills cop movie when you saw the semi truck full of cigarettes hit the one parked car and it went completely in the air and came back down, that's what this looked like to a T.
She came back down in front of him and they started coming across the highway towards me. I made a snap decision and turned half a turn to the right aiming at the bus lot and put myself in the sleeper headfirst they made contact with my truck at the left front axle, (now I might add I was driving a conventional Freightliner at the time) he pushed her car through my front axle through my fuel tank through my battery box through my tandem axles which turned my truck on its right side at that point, through the landing gears on the trailer and wrapped them back three quarters of the way through the 53 foot trailer, then knocked the trailer tandems 50 yards down the road.
Her car came to rest between my trailer and the tandems and he went on down the road maybe 75 yards and put it nose first into a ditch on his left side or the site I was on. I smelled battery acid so I righted myself came out of the sleeper grabbed the steering wheel and kicked out the right windshield and crawled out and walked around the front of my truck which was now on its side laying in the ditch in front of that bus lot I looked down and saw what looked like a Brillo pad which was once that 1992 Crown Victoria Ford.
Needless to say she was killed on impact the steel hauler had injuries and was taken to the hospital I came out without a scratch, so I was standing around as the accident investigation was going on. Now of course since I was the only one remaining at the scene of the accident, I was asked to take a breathalyzer, I blew a zero, that wasn't good enough they put me in a squad car and took me to the state police barracks and made me blow two more zero's and give a urine sample and a blood sample.
They were absolutely convinced that I or the steel hauler had completely caused this accident and were 100% at fault, I'm sure they tested his blood at the hospital as well. They were just absolutely convinced that we had killed this old lady and they wound up poring over my logs and kept me in custody for almost 8 hours doing it.
This was in the days before cell phones and after the accident I had to really call my dispatcher because of the type load that I had that when something like this happened Uncle Sam really wanted to know. So the young woman at the house who I found out later was the woman's granddaughter let me use the phone. I told my dispatcher and he freaked wanting to know the trailer had broke open which I told him it had and he really freaked out.
After I hung up this young lady offered me a Coke and was telling me that she was afraid this was going to happen, and I asked her what she meant by that and she told me that her grandfather was 90 and had black lung, and his insurance had run out, and her grandmother had $100,000 life insurance policy that I guess paid double for accidental death. Now I have no doubt that she committed suicide using me and the other truck as the instrument.
When I told this to the state troopers they wanted none of it, it was either me or the other driver who was at fault and that she just didn't see the steel hauler. Now where that theory breaks down and is flawed is simple, had she not seen the steel hauler she would've pulled out into the lane coming towards me he would've hit his brakes and probably cussed her out under his breath and everybody would've been happy and still living. But she turned into the turning lane and was running slow in the turning lane waiting for him to come by on the outside and timed it just perfectly before veering in front of him. I have no doubt she saw him or she wouldn't have used that center lane.
But the whole point of this long-winded post is that while things may seem obvious they may not always be. And people always talk about professional drivers, but sometimes things can spiral out of control to a point where even a professional driver can't avoid an accident.
