A Friday Night, Two Years Ago
My Niece is in a country band and they were having their CD release party in Baltimore (Maryland, just north of Washington, DC). I agree to pick up my Sister to drive her up to the gig and do so.

As we are sitting at a light about 1/4 mile from her home, first in line, with an SUV on my right, a car going the other way veers across two lanes of traffic going about 60 miles an hour. She hits the SUV HEAD on, missing my car by literally a foot.

The impact turns the SUV 180 degrees and the offending vehicle, now a compacted mass of steel and plastic, careens across a gas station, coming to rest alongside a gas pump...and proceeds to catch fire.

Like a complete idiot (see previous posts, I was a Marine, so, apparently, I am not the most intelligent of folks) I drive INTO the gas station and park my car with my Registered Nurse sister screaming at me.

I exit the vehicle and go to see about extracting the offending driver from the burning car. Now, I say "burning car" but it had only just started. So I figure if I dont get her out of there, she is going to burn to death.

As I am about halfway across the station, nearing the vehicle I realize: fire + gas = calamity (see what I mean?) and I decide a fire extinguisher should be my first priority.

Another passerby had the same idea and grabbed one and began extinguishing the now significantly larger fire in the engine area and underneath the vehicle...freeing me up to go check on the driver.

She was in there. In between being alive and dead and the dashboard had been pushed up snug against her chest. She was in shock and incapable of speech. I try to get her to make eye contact with me so I can assure her that she is going to be okay to try and calm her. Shock had already set well in.

I had to reach into the wreckage to turn the vehicle ignition off (while the vehicle was off, the open circuit in a gas station, full of vapors and now, thanks to her, a growing puddle of potentially flammable liquids, could be deadly to anyone within 50ft of the car) and when I did so I realized the reason she could turn it off was that her hands, and most of her forearms were PART of the dashboard mess and the left wrist looked as if it soon would be the cause of her death, with the thing having been cut about 3/4 of the way through.

I turned the key and just then, a Police officer came up and put his hand on my shoulder and said "I’ve got this."

I found out later that she died on the way to the hospital.

And once again, on the drive into Baltimore with my Sister I realized how close I had come to not only being in a significant accident, but to also having been burned crispy in a fiery gas station explosion...at least that’s what would have happened in a movie...right?

Sorry for the length of the posts I’ve been putting up on this one, its hard to keep them short.
( Citadel Because the world needs less morons, Sat 23 Jun 2007, 7:27, Reply)