MVA
by Tom on May.03, 2005, under Uncategorized
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?
