Easter

Well Easter has come and gone with the usual road carnage. A friend and I were driving along a 2 lane highway about an hour out of Melbourne on one of my days off and we passed a car that was sitting at a T-junction with a side road - the front of the car had been ripped off completely and there was debris all over the road. I could see two people still in the front seats. As nobody seemed to have stopped, I chucked a U-turn and pulled up to see if everybody was ok.

The driver told me they had been driving along the side road towards the intersection with the highway - he'd pulled up late at the stop sign and the nose of his car had crossed the line into the lane where the traffic was doing 100 kph. At that moment a semi-trailer, a fully laden 18 wheeler, had come past tearing the whole front of the car off. Fortunately the driver and his young son were shaken up but unhurt. I asked if there was anything I could do for them, but they had a tow truck on the way already.

On my way home I got to thinking how close that was to being yet another Easter 'road toll' statistic. Really if that car had rolled even 6 inches further before stopping, the car would have been impacted and spun violently rather than just clipped. I suspect the outcome might have been very different. It rained really hard on the trip home and as always I saw people speeding, overtaking on blind corners and apparently believing they are invincible. If there is one thing I have learned, it is that this job soon teaches you that people are many things ... and invincible is not one of them.