Saturday, June 12, 2010

Don't Drink and Drive

When I come home after a long day at work I can depend on one thing - my neighborhood is peaceful and quiet. I live on a street that time forgot. Neighbors know each other and other than new looking cars our neighborhood could be from any time from its beginning in the 1950s to the present. We like living here. We live right off a highway but other than rush hour its pretty quiet. The outside world just doesn't affect our little neighborhood.

Until today......

When I came home after shopping today I turned onto the service road only to discover a very long line of cars waiting to get through our quiet little neighborhood and around a huge number of flashing lights just past my block.

This picture doesn't show it well but there were cars coming up and going down my street - cars lined up on the service road. Just a big mess.

Once I got home (and Chief yelled at me for leaving for 2 hours) I grabbed the camera and headed down the block to see what happened.

Here you can see the line up of cars on the service road better. If there's a couple cars an hour on this road its a busy day. Hard to see what's going on but off in the distance on the next block is the cause of all the traffic. Lots of official vehicles and lots of lights.

The lady that lives on the corner house of my block got the scoop from the guy next door who was out in his yard when the whole thing happened. He's also a good one to ask questions of official type people so usually knows the whole story.
Our highway is a quiet one with a 45mph limit. About 4 blocks away on either side of me are stop lights, so it's not a freeway where you can go long distances without having to stop.
Some guy decided to drive down our highway at 70+mph and slammed into a little red pickup truck. The pickup then slammed into the car next to it.
Once the police, ambulance, fire department and several others got there, the guy was hauled away because he was drunk. His kid went to the hospital and the lady was stuck in her truck. By the time I got home they were still trying to get her out and about 15 minutes later the ambulance was heading down the road. When I left to go back home cars were still being routed around the accident.


This all leads me to the 2 questions I always ask:
Why do people think its OK to drink and drive?
Why to people think speed limits aren't for them?
Oh one more question-
What kind of stupid moron drives drunk and speeds with their kid in the car?!?
Please be safe in your car.

2 comments:

Christine said...

Oh crap! I can't figure out where you live! It would have been more fun if you made up road signs instead of greening them out!

Beth said...

Very sad. Hopefully the kid was at least wearing a seat belt. In our town driving drunk is not nearly as popular as texting and driving with your kids meandering the aisle of your minivan or crawling over seats. It is astonishing to me that people treat their lives, and that of their children, with so little respect. Not to mention the innocent bystanders to their idiocy. I pray this kid and the woman involved are safe and sound.