found your wheel.
|
One
of the drawbacks of living in a major metropolitan area is the close
proximity
to and high density of irresponsible idiots who are too lazy to do
something as
simple as tying down loose stuff in the back of their truck. But I’m getting ahead of myself. My
wife was driving into Boston to see a patient last Saturday morning
when from
out of the blue a wheel came sailing over the divider from the other
side of
I93, bounced once, and smashed into her front driver’s side wheel and
fender,
causing her to lose control and skid across two lanes of traffic before
sliding
to a halt in the slow lane. The wheel
took out two more cars before coming to rest by the divider. Through some minor miracle, none of the cars
actually collided with anyone else, despite heavy traffic, and no one
was hurt. This
stretch of interstate is just a couple of miles south of downtown and
has no
emergency lane, so traffic began piling up immediately.
The cops showed up within a few minutes, and
after ascertaining that no one was injured told all of the drivers to
move
their wrecked cars off the highway via an exit that was just up ahead. My wife’s front wheel was bent at about a
twenty degree angle, but the cop insisted it was drivable, so she drove
it off
the exit with the wheel wobbling and making grinding noises and some
unidentified fluid leaking from the engine compartment. At
first, the cop didn’t seem to understand what had happened. He actually asked my wife if she was sure the
wheel hadn’t come off of her own car.
Let’s see, count ‘em, one, two, three, four wheels on the
car and a
spare still secured to the back, so, that would be a no.
Once he finally understood that, yes, the
wheel must have come from the other side of the highway (probably
bouncing out
of the back of someone’s truck), he offered the helpful insight that
there was
a 99.9% chance that the owner of the wheel would never be identified;
either he
was oblivious to having lost it, or he saw the mess he caused and chose
to
keep on driving. One would like to think
that someone else on I93 south might have seen what happened and
reported a
license number to the police, but we’re not holding our collective
breath. Of
the other two cars that were hit, one was drivable, but the other had
its
entire front driver’s side fender peeled back and ultimately had to be
taken
away by tow. As for my wife’s car, in
addition to the crushed fender, broken axel, and bent wheel (plus who
knows
what other damage hidden behind it), the front bumper and the driver’s
door
both took some damage. We are waiting to
see if the insurance company will declare it a total loss or try to
have it
fixed up. I
arrived about a half hour after the accident, and the police and the
other two
cars were already gone. The police can
be really efficient when they want to be.
As
our tow-truck driver informed us, it could have been a lot worse. If the wheel had bounced a foot higher it
would have come right through the windshield.
If there had been a car in one of the two lanes next to
her she would
have been T-boned. Given that there was
no emergency lane, she could easily have been hit from behind after she
came to
a stop. Given that all of this happened
in high-density traffic that was moving at 60-70 mph, you don’t need to
understand ½ mv^2 to recognize how potentially bad a situation
this was. So
yeah, whoever you are out there, the cops have your wheel. Come
and get it at your convenience. |