ACCIDENT RECONSTRUCTION: LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE
by John Lee
It's hard to expect this from a beginner, to be able to test limits without losing it. . . . but when you get on, and get serious. . . you'd better lose it to some degree and catch it. . . . and the car is still in one piece, and I'm still in one piece. That's what you work up to, that's what it's all about. --Mario Andretti, Formula One and Indycar World Champion, from the video Drive to Win
The corporate news media usually portrays motor vehicle tragedies in junk-food-news format. In other words, any opportunity to improve public safety is usually lost by focusing on apportioning blame to "driver error," rather than analyzing the crash in detail as the reporter would most other news stories. The government and corporate media's attitude towards crash reporting gives a cynical citizen the impression that their purpose is to deflect public attention from legal liabilities that might arise should anyone take a closer look at a crash event. Governments often cut corners on highway safety, allowing taxes to be squandered on bureaucratic overhead. Corporate advertisers must never be offended by a corporate media seeking maximum profits. Vehicle manufacturers pay closer attention to Wall Street profits than NHTSB reports of vehicle defects. However, every crash has a valuable lesson that can be learned from its tragedy.
The following is a tragic example of what can go wrong with a front-wheel-drive car. I believe that the collision could have been avoided by either driver, using the techniques described above.
My wife was driving home from work at 1:00 a.m. The rural road was isolated and unlit. Conditions were dry. Arriving at the entry to a corner, she realized the car she had been following had just collided with another car approaching from the opposite direction. It was a head-on collision, with her lane of the road completely blocked by the wreckage.
She pulled over off the side of the road, and switched on her emergency flashers. Steam was rising from a smashed radiator, and fuel was spilling from a crumpled gas tank. It was pitch dark, with no street lamps or moonlight. Both female drivers were unconscious. The car traveling in the opposite direction had crossed the centerline, and was already sideways when it was T-boned from the passenger side by the car in front of my wife. The car in front of her was not heavily damaged. However, the interior of the T-boned car was now only 12 inches wide. . . . Luckily, there were no passengers in either car. Although trained in aircraft "crash recovery" (bagging and tagging mangled body parts) by the military, my wife was not really prepared for this.
At this point a truck pulled over, towing a race car back from a Saturday night at the races. The driver got out, and helped assess the situation. He declared that the woman in the less damaged car (the one she had been following) was in extremely bad shape, warning my wife that she didn't want to take a look. My wife ordered the other driver to go set up a road block, so that other cars would not come plowing into the wreck and kill everyone. Another car stopped, and was sent to call 911.
As he drove off, she focused on the remaining victim, who was beginning to regain consciousness. The victim was incoherant, fading in and out of consciousness. There was no odor of alcohol on her breath. My wife stayed by the car for forty-five minutes, holding her and talking to her, attempting to comfort her panic, and help her to stay alert and fight for life.
Other cars were driving by, and each one she flagged down to send for help. Some stopped and helped by lighting up the crash site.
Fifteen minutes later, police began to arrive. The first officer declared the woman in the less damaged car DOA (Dead On Arrival). Over a dozen police cars eventually converged at the scene of the accident. None attempted to comfort the victims, or render any sort of first aid. It was thirty minutes before the ambulance arrived. The ambulance crew determined the "DOA" victim still had a pulse. However, she died before she could be removed from her car. She had not worn her crash belt--or her crash belt latch had malfunctioned. The victim's feet had virtually broken off and her head had contacted the steering wheel, which did not have an airbag.
The surviving victim was eventually removed from her crumpled car, and airlifted by helicopter to a hospital in the city. She survived with a concussion, a few broken bones and some memory loss.
This victim was placed under arrest for possible charges of vehicular homicide, and her driver's license was revoked. Since my wife, who was the only witness to wait for the Highway Patrol to arrive, told the officer there had been no alcohol on the victim's breath, the officer intentionally left her name off the crash report. This was an attempt to prevent her from being contacted by the survivor's attorneys. The state trooper alleged to the victim's family that their daughter had confessed to falling asleep while driving--the fact was that the trooper never met the victim, who had already been airlifted to the hospital before the cop had arrived.
Both drivers had been in cars using front-wheel-drive. On a race track, when approaching a car that is skidding sideways--a daily occurance, it is best to brake as hard as possible, then just before impact release the brakes slightly and aim for the direction it is coming from, rather than where it is going. It is usually possible to completely avoid crashing into a spinning car. In such a situation, there is no need to panic and freeze. Just brake hard, then change lanes. The woman who died collided with the skidding car without deviating from her painted lane of the highway. Being "right" doesn't count for much in this situation. Race drivers also try to lift their feet off the foot pedals just before an inevitable crash impact, to lesson the possibility of broken bones. It is also better to T-bone a car on either end, rather than the middle--this will reduce the shock of the impact. Also, wearing a seatbelt may be uncomfortable, but it might prove useful for a once in a lifetime disaster.
However, until vehicles are required to be constructed with much stronger bodies, people are still at high risk during collisions. The female driver of the T-boned car above was only wearing a shoulder belt. The passenger side door ended up at the centerline of her steering wheel. If she had had her lap belt on, her injuries could have been life threatening.
I once had a serious crash, in a front-wheel-drive car at a "bomb hole" type corner. I had had a government job that required traveling, and I was not very familiar with the road. If I had been wearing my seat belt that day (which I normally did), I would not now be writing this book--the driver's side of the car was completely crushed, and luckily I had been thrown to the passenger side. This wreck occurred a long time ago, and it was many years later--and many race car driving schools later, using front-wheel-drive cars--before I finally understood why I had lost all steering in the car. It had felt like the tire had suddenly deflated and come off the rim: throttle-off understeer.
As for the driver who initially lost control, she seemed to remember (her memory was very sketchy) that when she applied her brakes, her car seemed to move to the right, which was the inside of the corner. This (may have) caused the car to drop the right side wheels off the road (five feet from the painted line), hitting the raised edge of the asphalt when she drove back onto the road. This bump is what caused the final loss of control, skidding sideways into the other lane of traffic. There were no skid marks before the car put a wheel in the gravel, only after all four wheels were back on the ashalt. However, any attempt to correct the skid (as taught by the government), with the driver's foot off the gas pedal, was doomed to failure, due to throttle-off understeer. She had lost all ability to steer her car.
This particular corner was a downhill, decreasing radius, blind curve. At night, with a driver untrained in techniques needed to compensate for the instability of her front-wheel-drive car, it was a recipe for disaster. Her only technical violation was possibly exceeding the arbitrarily low speed limit (driving the normal speed of all other traffic), not homicide. There were no skid marks prior to dropping a wheel off the road, so there is no actual proof of true "excessive speed" (exceeding the vehicle's and driver's ability to keep the tires firmly on the road). It wasn't her fault the other driver probably was driving slightly above the excessively low speed limit. It wasn't her fault the other driver unfortunately didn't wear a seat belt, didn't have an airbag, and didn't know how to take avoiding action. It wasn't her fault that front-wheel-drive cars are unstable and unpredictable. It wasn't her fault that there is no such road sign as "decreasing radius curve." It wasn't her fault that night decreased what little visibility there was in that blind corner.
A similar accident occurred when a state trooper lost control on a crowded highway, hitting a motorist head-on. The trooper was T-boned, and had to be admitted to hospital. He was on his way to another accident scene, which had already been taken care of by the local police. Troopers only fill out reports (and write tickets or make arrests), while local police take care of handling traffic, rescuing victims and calling ambulance crews. (That's one reason why local cops don't care much for the arrogant state police.) News reports blamed a citizen for pulling out in front of him, while the officer was driving at extremely high speed through heavy city traffic, "causing" the officer to have a head-on collision with a second citizen. This officer was not placed under arrest, as any citizen would have been (although he was eventually fired for committing other crimes, such as selling stolen government property).
There is much that can be learned from every crash, just as government and industry learns as much as they can from every single aircraft failure. Whether it's a glitch in technology or a lack of pilot training, information is passed on to all other pilots to benefit from someone else's bad experience. That ability to learn is how America went from the Wright brothers to the moon in only 60 years. So why does the government not do the same with automobiles? Why are citizens who drive, instead of fly, treated as imbeciles? Skid-control training would cost less than a typical speeding ticket, and would virtually innoculate graduates from accidental crashes. In addition to emergency training, simple and inexpensive safety devices can be installed by manufacturers on their vehicles. For example, fuel systems shutoff valves, operated by the airbag crash detection system, can stop the flow of gasoline onto a red-hot exhaust system. Fires needlessly kill many crash victims who would otherwise have survived. On-board fire extinguisher systems cost less than a set of floor mats. Every new racing driver asks why passenger vehicles don't use crash belt latches like those required for race cars. This would prevent many failures of flimsy seat belt latches (easily blamed on a victim for allegedly not wearing his crash belt). A four-point crash belt system, using wider and stronger belts, would reduce or eliminate internal injuries from rapid decelleration. Every taxpayer donates money so that government aircraft pilots can wear safe crash belts while they kill people. Surely the citizens deserve equal protection while commuting to work and play? Rubber-lined, explosion-resistant fuel tanks, such as those donated to the government for use in killing people in wartime, cost 1/10th as much as a factory-installed stereo system. In the meantime, intelligent citizens can carry a cheap fire extinguisher in their glove box, and can remember to shut off the ignition switch immediately after a crash.
The government profits from traffic violations and criminal prosecutions -- a "crash tax." Society learns nothing in the process. One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, yet each time expecting a different result.
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