Ok, I witnessed the craziest crash today and I'm lucky I wasn't a part of it.
Now this rambling post that will probably take me ten minutes to type, and the event that I've been thinking about all day, probably all went down in under 20 seconds.
So, I'm having a nice afternoon driving SB down the FL Turnpike to go pick something up before work. I'm somewhere between Boca and Tamarac...I think I was in Pompano. There are about five cars in front of me and then we have my man, pickup truck guy with a box work trailer. You know them, the ones like this:
Then I notice the few cars in front of me slow down...not to a crawl but from 80 to about 50. "What's going on here?" I think to myself while enjoying my midday drive music. Well then I see it, there was a tire bouncing down the road. It was having a gay old time bouncing along with the flow of traffic over by the left shoulder and concrete lane divider. Honestly I should have been way more scared. I've seen plenty of rogue tire Youtubes and the havoc they wreak but a major accident wasn't really on my mind.
Well then our friend, the tire newly freed from it's axle constraints, decides bouncing along the SB shoulder isn't enough excitement for it and it hops the divider and is now bouncing SB in the NB lanes. Here enters our new player...The White Range Rover...and shit gets real. Poor guy. Must not have seen it in time cause it smashes into the front driver's side of the hood/engine compartment and FREAKING TOTALS THE ROVER! Who can blame him, it hopped the divider at the exact time he was passing. The Rover looked like it had driven head on into a wall. Shit flew everywhere and the Rover...now out of control, smashed into the divider.
Oh but wait, this story is far from over. Our friend the free tire does not want to give up its freedom. Somehow, after smashing into and totaling the Rover, it gets propelled back into the air and now flies back over to the SB lanes. And when I say it flew, it freaking flew. It was in the air well above my car. So at this point I'm driving under a flying tire. I'm not sure if I'm getting this across well enough. This freaking tire was way high up in the air. It was really quite the sight. I didn't see it land. Not sure if it landed off the side of the road or right back into SB traffic. I had passed under it and was kinda focused on getting the hell out of there at this point. That thing would have smashed the RAV roof like an egg, crushing the Dutch yolk inside.
Anyway, this story comes to an end about a quarter mile down the road when I see another pickup truck...one of the five or so cars in front of me when this all went down, conduct a citizen's pull-over of the dude with the trailer. He kinda got in front of the guy, cut him off and was pointing for him to pull over. The trailer was still driving pretty well. The other tire on the same side as the one that came loose was fine and keeping the trailer moving kinda like normal. I saw them both pulling over as I passed by and got a good look at the axle missing a tire.
I'm pretty sure no one got killed cause I searched for it on local news sites and came up empty. So that's a plus at least. I really feel bad for the Rover guy. He's lucky it didn't hit his windshield but man I'd be pissed if I were that guy.
It was really rather an intense 20 seconds. I wish I had a Russian Dash Cam to show you guys the video.