A Tale of Two Crashes

It's high time that the snow melted. Personally, I'm tired of it. I am tending part of my brother's yearling aged additions to his Red Angus herd this winter, and it's starting to get old with the weather related hardships. Thats not really what I intend to address in this post, however, so I'll move on.

Notable traffic crashes are on my mind today. I'll tell you why this popped to the front of the line in a paragraph or so, but now I'll take a few minutes to describe one event that this current memory trigger reminded me of. I don't remember the year, but you'll see from the photo below that it was a day somewhere close in calendar proximity to the months we have just lived through.



You may be saying to yourself, that's a pretty handy extrication job those firefighters performed to get that car open and get the patient out, but that's not how it happened.

One morning, as folks often do, they get in their cars and head to work. One individual - afterwards identified as "Person A" traveling to such a destination crossed paths with another person having the same goal of meeting the day at the office on time. Person A was the driver of the car in the photo. Person B and Person A met - quite literally - on the roads of northwestern Cache County that particular morning, in a pretty violent manner. You see, the rip in the car above was not the handy work of the jaws of life, it was the result of a violent collision.

The next thought would be how many died in the crash. Even stranger is the outcome because on arrival both Person A and Person B were walking it off, so to speak, without obvious sign of injury to either. In emergency response lingo the likelihood of injury - based on the type of damage present on the vehicle carrying the patients - is called mechanism of injury. The patients in this crash were transported for a closer evaluation based solely on the type of damage clearly visible here.

All's well that ends well, basically. The insurance companies were left to sort it all out and everyone went on their way just slightly worse for the wear.

Flash forward to February 28, 2008. A differnt "Person A" is stopped on a highway in Cache County, watching the rear flashers of a school bus mark the time. Person B is travelling rapidly along the same road. A third player is present, related to the wintry weather being suffered through by such cow caretakers as myself - fog.

"Person B" doesn't have enough reaction time to apply much if any pressure to the braking device and impacts the rear of Person A's vehicle at a nice clip. Person A's vehicle reacts to the sudden application of physics and travels the 15 or so feet required to reach the rear end of the bus. The bus reacts to the sudden application of physics and becomes an object in motion as well, until the last bit of applied force is used up.

What happens next? An accident report is initiated; law enforcement responds; the school district brings out another bus and takes the children on to school; an engine company from the closest city comes to clean up the spilt fluids. Wait a minute, what about the patients? Well, no ambulance comes to the scene, but both are taken to the hospital privately to deal with the possible results of that pesky mechanism of injury business. Oh, and the other difference is that Person A in this crash is a relative to me.

All's well that ends well, basically. The insurance companies were left to sort it all out and everyone went on their way just slightly worse for the wear. Below are a front and rear end view of Vehicle A.