Crash!!!

So I was in a car wreck today. I mentioned it on my twitter page, but here are details in case anyone is wondering. The roads were getting bad, so Steph (my fiancee) asked me if I could pick her up from work. I said fine and after wandering around my house for a while to find my wallet (cuz I’m awful about putting it in the same place) left. The roads were not great, but they weren’t awful and they had salted my road (one of the worst two on the commute), and I have 4 wheel drive so I figured good, I’ll be ok.

I got to the other crappy road. It’s a hill after a bridge over some train tracks. I got to the end of the bridge and looked down and the road had some snow but didn’t look awful. I figured I’d go really slow and turned my wheel to the left to start. I didn’t even get a chance to take my foot off the brake. My car just took off sliding down the hill.

Brakes: no effect.

Steering wheel: no effect.

Started picking up speed and knew it was going to be bad. The road turns dramatically to the right half way down and I had no way to turn or even slow down. I hit a railing, go through it and straight into a brick wall. Three seconds later, my airbag decided to deploy. Ummm, yay for safety.

So I curse out loud to myself for a few seconds, and then get out of the car happy to be alive. I get my cellphone and my wallet out of my pocket to begin calling cops, insurance, tow truck, etc. Before I can, a couple walking down the road stops to see if I’m ok. While I’m telling them I’m fine, a tow-truck pulls up. I’m amazed that they could have been there that quickly but he tells me he happened to be driving by at the bottom of the hill. As he’s talking to me, a policeman comes walking up the hill (he couldn’t get his cop car up the hill). He tells me one of the people in the houses had called 911 and he happened to be close. So I’m doing my police report and talking to the cop when another cop gets there, and my regular mechanic, comes walking up. I wasn’t far from home, you see, and when he heard about a wreck he walked over to check on people. So he immediately recognizes me and my car tells me he’s glad I’m ok and asks if I want the car towed to his shop. Wonderful. Things are at least starting to be ok. And then then one of the cops says something like “Oh my god, we better get out of the way.” We all look up the hill and there’s another car hurtling towards us out of control. So we all go off the side of the road and the second car comes down, hits the back and side of my car, damaging it further and also hits the wall next to me. Now my police report has turned into from a one car wreck to a two car wreck. (the cop informs me that if he hadn’t actually hit me, that’d still be a one car wreck, but because there was contact they have to count it as two).

The cop and tow truck driver then tell us that it sucks, because they just repaved this road, and there’s been a bunch of wrecks on it. If they hadn’t repaved it, the potholes used to basically stop anyone who skidded down. Yeah, umm… that makes me feel better. On a good note, having a brick wall to run into stopped me from careening over the side of the hill, so that’s good.