Near misses

We had an interesting experience driving to the doctor. On one of the bridges the ramp to the highway was closed for repairs so all traffic was exiting onto a local road with one lane and a traffic light. So traffic was going slow until one part on the down slope of the bridge when it stopped short. It was raining lightly so the road was slick. I managed to stop without incident and so did the car behind me. Relieved, I watched the traffic in front of me.

Then I heard a loud squealing from behind me and checked the mirror. Two cars back a truck was bouncing as the driver hit the brakes hard, then it veered to the left, I think to get more room to stop. As it veered, the truck hit the car in front of it and that car hit the car behind me. We were not hit. But the truck kept coming, sliding sideways. I started looking for room to maneuver but both lanes were blocked and there was no shoulder.

Too slowly for my taste, and I’m sure the driver’s, the truck bounced up onto the concrete divider and came to a stop. If the bridge had been more than two lanes wide I think it would have jackknifed.

I don’t know if the truck driver had trouble with the slick road or if someone cut him off – people were jockeying back and forth between the two lanes on the bridge. I only saw the aftermath. We were lucky. One car further back, or a little closer and we would have been hit. Even a minor collision would have seriously injured my wife so I was very grateful for our escape.

The traffic further back on the bridge was pretty luck as well. The trucker managed to get himself off the divider and drove off onto the closed ramp along with the two cars behind me. I hope everybody was uninjured. There didn’t seem to be much damage to the vehicles, so there’s a good chance that no one was seriously hurt.

We crawled through the traffic jam, I took a bad guess on a turn trying to avoid the mess on the smaller streets, backtracked a bit and we eventually made it to the doctor. It really is a sight to see a truck almost flip over not forty feet behind you, but I would have done fine without the experience.