Posted on

Be careful out there… cars are WMDs

This happened a few days ago a few houses up our street: Man crashes car into swimming pool (in the Australian, other mentions on ABC and news.com.au).
(There’s a Dutch driving instruction joke: “kaboom = halt!, splash = water”. This nutball managed to do both at the same time.)
FYI: two kids had just come out that pool only minutes before. The parked car (with a baby seat) had noone in it at the time. Its smashing into a pole caused a powerline across the road to snap, cutting the power to two houses and putting a rather dangerous live wire on the road, near debris, sparks and water).

A few years ago something similar happened early one morning, a 4.0 litre Ford Ute wrapped wrapped itself around the Canadian maple tree at the front of our house, did a full spin, and ended up on our driveway. The driver then fell asleep, he and his companion were both very drunk (I understand that some blood was later detected in their alcohol).
A police officer told me that the extreme drunkenness probably saved their lives, because their bodies were so relaxed. And hey, they’d been going around the block a handful of times already, so they knew the road well. Here are some some illustrative photos.

All lucky (possibly undeserving) bastards, all alive and pretty much unscathed. Amazing, considering. Definitely not recommended to try anything similar: a stunt driver would have a difficult time recreating either event safely.
Anyway… it’s not a street with heavy traffic, we’re just at the bottom between two hills. People freewheel down, if they weren’t speeding already. Some bends, a few parked cars, optional alcohol, a touch of optimism and a common dash of plain stupidity, and thus we have another kaboom.
And some time the person won’t be so lucky. Or one of our kids…

So, particularly around these festive days, let’s be careful out there, eh?
And if you must, put alcohol in your petrol tank, but please don’t let it behind the steering wheel!

Posted on