MVA

One of the mor­bid plea­sures of being a fire­man is invest­ing motor vehi­cle acci­dents (or MVAs, as pretty much every­one calls them in the depart­ment). While there’s no pos­i­tive to some­one get­ting seri­ously hurt or going through the psy­cho­log­i­cal expe­ri­ence of dam­ag­ing one of their most expen­sive pos­ses­sions, it can be quite inter­est­ing try­ing to fig­ure out how the hell the peo­ple had the accident.

Per­fect exam­ple was this morn­ing. Upon arrival on the scene, I can see it’s a one car acci­dent (unless you count the parked box truck the car hit that hasn’t moved in years, prob­a­bly.) Yet, with the angle the car hit the box truck, you look around and try to fig­ure out why the car hit the box truck in the first place.

It’s kind of neat, espe­cially with the whole boom of shows like Law & Order and CSI, you’ve got a bunch of ama­teur detec­tives look­ing around the scene, look­ing for skid marks or bro­ken shrubs. One belief that the car had jumped the curb and crashed into the truck (which would explain the angle) was nixed, even after hav­ing pointed out tire tracks in the dirt and a bent back shrub, when it was noted that the shrub was bent in the oppo­site direc­tion that the car would have been going to have the accident.

The guess was that the car was try­ing to bypass the sig­nal light by tak­ing a short­cut through the park­ing lot of the local bev­er­age out­let. In tak­ing that quick short­cut, the per­son either was met by another car com­ing in the other side (not too likely, unless some­one was doing the short­cut in the oppo­site direc­tion, since the bev­er­age out­let didn’t open for almost two hours) or per­haps a pedes­trian, caus­ing the car to swerve away and col­lid­ing into the box truck, which was parked.

Either way, the per­son dri­ving the vehi­cle can’t be given too much sym­pa­thy — whether it was an ill-advised short cut or falling asleep or a cell phone inci­dent, there was no one to blame here except her.

She’ll be OK, though. She was just a lit­tle shaken up. I wouldn’t be talk­ing about it if she got seri­ously hurt though, would I?