I heard booming on the street outside my window Saturday night. It wasn't startling. I hear glass break, people scream, music blare and buses bounce along the street almost every night. But this time the pounding was different; it was more prolonged and kind of melodic.
I looked out the window and, lo and behold, there was an accident. A black minivan blew a red light and smashed into a small, 4-door sedan. Somehow another car was involved, I'm not sure how.
"Well well well," I thought. "Something to enrich my otherwise boring night." (I was writing a paper on psychological perceptions of risk. Sounds interesting. Is actually boring.)
the scene:
The first car to pull up to the accident was a cop, so my duties as a citizen were waived. I grabbed my camera.
Click, click click.
I called Alex, who was in Boston, to share the exciting news.
"Babe, you are not going to believe what you're missing. A guy plowed into a car and now our intersection is blocked by three cars. There's tons of cops (I exaggerated) and a firetruck. No firetruck dog, but I think I see a HOSE."
It felt exciting. Until something happened that made me want to vomit.
A firemen pulled out big metal pliers- the "jaws of life"- and another fireman crawled into the passenger's side door of the impacted vehicle. I hadn't even noticed. A woman was still inside the crushed car.
Why isn't she getting out? It's cold outside? She doesn't have a hat. Can't she crawl over the passenger's seat?
A fireman pried the driver's side door off. The woman was pulled out of the car, her head hung like a rag doll. The body was placed on a stretcher. There was no rushing. No medics. No resuscitation. No sense that this was a person who was going to be saved. They put a sheet over body.
"Oh my God," I said and hung up the phone.
At 7 pm, a woman was driving east on Madison St. past Cathedral St. in Baltimore. She was wearing a red coat, brown pants and brown boats. By 7:30 pm, she was dead.
We have a misnomer in the English language. We call car crashes "accidents". An "accident" is when you don't see a nail on the floor and you step on it. Or when your kid mistakenly pees in his pants because he hasn't learned how to control his bladder. Car crashes (99% of the time) aren't accidents. They're avoidable.
In an "injury class" this semester (Hopkins has an entire center devoted to injuries), we learned a lot about "accidents". If you hit someone at 25 mph, they might live. The statistics get worse as mph goes up. At 85 mph, there is zero chance of survival (for anyone inside or outside the car) 100% of the time.
