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There's an area on the outskirts of town where there's still a farm stubbornly hanging on between to developed plots of townhomes. Between these two urban areas you won't find any stoplights, just 4 lanes of unbroken road with no side-streets for a couple miles.
Naturally, lots of kids, and to be fair, grown ups, decide that this is the perfect place to get their money's worth out of their fancy-schmancy new BMW/Porsche/Whatever.
And, like clockwork, when someone decides to do that, it's almost a given that they wreck at the exact same place, where the road makes a tiny, almost inconsequential. dip down and to the right. At normal surface street speeds, it's just that, inconsequential.
But, at "Whoopee!" speeds of 80, 90 and above, it's enough to bounce the car up to the end of it's suspension travel, or bottom it out without warning, depending on if you were going east or west at the time.
This frequently catches the drivers off guard, they panic, skid, overcorrect, pull a 180, and go backwards off the apex of the road and into the Ditch of Shame (tm) where we winch out the totalled hot-rodder at great expense.
Eastbound wrecks are much more fun because they end up having to cross the median to get there, a 5'' raised curb, which, at Dukes of Hazzard speeds, can do some spectacular reshaping of metal as the car goes rocketing over it, usually enough to split rims, rip the guts out of the engine or make the car look like a cereal box does when you open both ends and then twist......
(Last year, a guy in Mercedes SLK crashed here hard enough that he was over the ditch, halfway up a tree, and had wrecked so hard he popped out his sunroof glass. Despite his insistence he was only doing 50, the cops were unimpressed and cited him, saying he should just be lucky to still be ambulatory after that. He was on his way back from the dairy and had a milk jug in the car with him, an old-school glass one that exploded during the crash and sent shrapnel all over the interior. He's lucky he didn't get his throat cut in the process! The car sat in our backlot for a month before the salvage yard came for it. Let me tell you, a black-on-black car, in the sun for a month, with spilled milk in it? Mmmmm... yummy! The stench knocked the salvage guy back a half-a-step when he opened the door to put it in "N" to winch it onto his flatbed
)
Anyway, our latest customer landed here last week when he lost control of his brand-new Porsche Panamera (less than 5K on the clock) and went over the median and into the ditch. It was spectacular. The front wheels were totally destroyed, with large chunks knocked out of their aluminum castings, and, the body was so torqued-out-of-shape the doors no longer line up with where they should be when fully closed. From where he ended up, he had to be doing almost 80 when he lost it, or, had at least SLOWED DOWN to that before hitting something that didn't give.
This driver was also lucky he didn't kill himself and walked away uninjured (he at least had enough intelligence to wear a seatbelt) from the smoldering wreck.
Randy got the call after 911 dispatched an officer to the scene who assessed what had happened, cutting the driver a nice new citation for excessive use of the rightmost pedal in the process.
When Randy himself got on scene, he noted that when the car hit the median, it guillotined off the oil pan, and all 5+ quarts of lubricant were now slathered all over two lanes of roadway. It took him all THREE bags of kitty litter on the truck to sop it all up and push it around with a broom until it absorbed the gooey mess.
The officer on scene, noting the scale of the mess, having had to shut traffic down because of it, and that there would be absolutely NO reason for any of them to be there right now had the rules of the road been followed, handed the driver one of the trash bags off the back of the tow truck and told him "Get out there an help him!"
Driver, who was leaning on his buddy's car, who'd come to pick him up, really didn't know how to react to that, and started to protest.
The cop shut him down. He shined a flashlight on the heap of twisted metal hung on the back of Randys' wrecker, specifically on one of the mangled wheels.
"That rim and tire you destroyed right there costs more than I make in a month! You're not standing here while he cleans up your mess, you give him a hand, NOW!"
Driver got to stand in the middle of the road, literally holding the bag, while Randy shoveled the kitty litter into it, all three garbage bags as it turned out....
It must've been near quitting time for the cop, that's the only thing I could think of that would tick him off enough that he practically forced someone to clean up at gunpoint.
Hope he learned some humility, but I doubt it, he looked way too young to ever be able to afford the MSRP on the car he just totalled, even if he'd saved every single penny he'd ever handled since kindergarten. The whole thing reeked of a Mommy-n-Daddy purchase gone awry, as now not only is their credit rating probably wrecked, but so's the flashy toy they bought him.
Naturally, lots of kids, and to be fair, grown ups, decide that this is the perfect place to get their money's worth out of their fancy-schmancy new BMW/Porsche/Whatever.
And, like clockwork, when someone decides to do that, it's almost a given that they wreck at the exact same place, where the road makes a tiny, almost inconsequential. dip down and to the right. At normal surface street speeds, it's just that, inconsequential.
But, at "Whoopee!" speeds of 80, 90 and above, it's enough to bounce the car up to the end of it's suspension travel, or bottom it out without warning, depending on if you were going east or west at the time.
This frequently catches the drivers off guard, they panic, skid, overcorrect, pull a 180, and go backwards off the apex of the road and into the Ditch of Shame (tm) where we winch out the totalled hot-rodder at great expense.
Eastbound wrecks are much more fun because they end up having to cross the median to get there, a 5'' raised curb, which, at Dukes of Hazzard speeds, can do some spectacular reshaping of metal as the car goes rocketing over it, usually enough to split rims, rip the guts out of the engine or make the car look like a cereal box does when you open both ends and then twist......
(Last year, a guy in Mercedes SLK crashed here hard enough that he was over the ditch, halfway up a tree, and had wrecked so hard he popped out his sunroof glass. Despite his insistence he was only doing 50, the cops were unimpressed and cited him, saying he should just be lucky to still be ambulatory after that. He was on his way back from the dairy and had a milk jug in the car with him, an old-school glass one that exploded during the crash and sent shrapnel all over the interior. He's lucky he didn't get his throat cut in the process! The car sat in our backlot for a month before the salvage yard came for it. Let me tell you, a black-on-black car, in the sun for a month, with spilled milk in it? Mmmmm... yummy! The stench knocked the salvage guy back a half-a-step when he opened the door to put it in "N" to winch it onto his flatbed
)Anyway, our latest customer landed here last week when he lost control of his brand-new Porsche Panamera (less than 5K on the clock) and went over the median and into the ditch. It was spectacular. The front wheels were totally destroyed, with large chunks knocked out of their aluminum castings, and, the body was so torqued-out-of-shape the doors no longer line up with where they should be when fully closed. From where he ended up, he had to be doing almost 80 when he lost it, or, had at least SLOWED DOWN to that before hitting something that didn't give.
This driver was also lucky he didn't kill himself and walked away uninjured (he at least had enough intelligence to wear a seatbelt) from the smoldering wreck.
Randy got the call after 911 dispatched an officer to the scene who assessed what had happened, cutting the driver a nice new citation for excessive use of the rightmost pedal in the process.
When Randy himself got on scene, he noted that when the car hit the median, it guillotined off the oil pan, and all 5+ quarts of lubricant were now slathered all over two lanes of roadway. It took him all THREE bags of kitty litter on the truck to sop it all up and push it around with a broom until it absorbed the gooey mess.
The officer on scene, noting the scale of the mess, having had to shut traffic down because of it, and that there would be absolutely NO reason for any of them to be there right now had the rules of the road been followed, handed the driver one of the trash bags off the back of the tow truck and told him "Get out there an help him!"
Driver, who was leaning on his buddy's car, who'd come to pick him up, really didn't know how to react to that, and started to protest.
The cop shut him down. He shined a flashlight on the heap of twisted metal hung on the back of Randys' wrecker, specifically on one of the mangled wheels.
"That rim and tire you destroyed right there costs more than I make in a month! You're not standing here while he cleans up your mess, you give him a hand, NOW!"
Driver got to stand in the middle of the road, literally holding the bag, while Randy shoveled the kitty litter into it, all three garbage bags as it turned out....
It must've been near quitting time for the cop, that's the only thing I could think of that would tick him off enough that he practically forced someone to clean up at gunpoint.
Hope he learned some humility, but I doubt it, he looked way too young to ever be able to afford the MSRP on the car he just totalled, even if he'd saved every single penny he'd ever handled since kindergarten. The whole thing reeked of a Mommy-n-Daddy purchase gone awry, as now not only is their credit rating probably wrecked, but so's the flashy toy they bought him.
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