There are just so many ways that a person can have an accident. Some of them are so bizarre that you can't believe that they happened. How many people out there use the roads? I bet most of you do, because almost all of us drive. That is one of the great things about this country, its roads. One poor guy was just driving along, minding his business. A truck was coming the other way, but the driver wasn't doing anything wrong. As the truck neared the car, with our hapless driver in it, a very strange thing happened. The drive shaft of the truck, a heavy metal tube, disconnected from the truck. It flew through the air, across the road and killed the poor driver of the car by hitting him in the head. It just goes to show you that you never know when your time is up.

There they were, enjoying a day home. Ah finally piece and quiet! Just then a car came roaring through their wall. But wait, there was no driver in it. It seems that the car had a remote starter and somehow, when it was started, in went into gear and took off. Luckily no one was hurt. Finding a parking space can be pretty hard. One driver decided to park under one of those high billboard signs, I think that you know the type. This particular sign was advertising muffins and featured a giant pan with six huge muffins in it. The muffins must have been made out of some heavy material, because when the guy came back to his car, it was crushed by a giant muffin that had fallen off of the sign. This was a very strange sight indeed. A crushed car with a muffin sitting perfectly on the roof. By the way, it seemed to be chocolate chip, the muffin, not the car. The passengers on this bus thought that they were going for a routine trip through the city and getting off at their stop. Fate wasn't going to let this happen. The bus went into a sinkhole. So far this is not to strange, but it get weirder. The way the bus went into the hole was the front end first. This caused the bus to stand on its nose like a column. The bus stayed this way until it was removed. It must have hurt when all the people on the bus fell to the front.

One guy was very lucky, I say lucky because he wasn't hurt, One of those aluminum light polls fell while he was driving. The pole somehow went through the wheel well on the front passenger side of the car, through the dash board on an angle, into the back of the car and out the passenger seat in the back on the driver's side, leaving the driver unscathed. Something tells me it is time for this guy to get a new car and go to church. A pilot flying a light plane nosed over while landing. The police came to his rescue and found all sorts of empty beer cans and drugs. The pilot fought the police. Later when he was interviewed he said that God told him to crash the plane because it was his time to die. He said that he had a suitcase of money in the back and seemed to indicate that the police took it. He also said that while the plane was in flight he taped the windows. When the plane was checked the windows were taped. but from the outside. A commercial flight was going along just nicely thank you, when the pilot decided to take a nap. Oh he didn't leave the plane unattended, the copilot took over. A flight attendant came into the cockpit with drinks for the flight crew. The copilot told her to place them down in a certain area. When she did, she activated the switch on the copilot's seat that moves his seat forward. This might have not been so bad ordinarily, but in this case he had his legs crossed. His legs was crushed against the plane's steering controls. This knocked off the auto pilot and the plane went into a steep dive, injuring several passengers and crew. Luckily the copilot was able to recover from the dive before the plane crashed.

Speaking of weird accidents, I have actually witnessed two myself. The first one occurred on a bridge that was constructed in such a way that there was a separation and space between the lanes that went into a part of the city and the lanes that went the other way. It wasn't a wide space, only a few feet, but if you fell into it, you would tumble down to the water. As I was driving across this bridge, I saw something unbelievable. There was a van sitting perfectly on the railings that separated the incoming and outgoing lanes from the open space. There wasn't a mark on the van. It looked like some giant had picked it up and gently placed it on the railings. People were standing around looking at it and scratching their heads. Yeah you never have a camera when you need one. That was before the time of cell phones. Another crazy accident that I witnessed and was almost involved in happened on a parkway. There is one stretch on a particular parkway that has a turn built in. It isn't a rapid turn, but a gradual one. The parkway is separated by a divider about 2 feet high in that area. I was a passenger in a car going east at the time. As we were driving, one of the west bound cars hit the divider and flew through the air over our heads, It flew so far that it landed on the shoulder of the east bound side. The wheels tipped the car in the extreme right lane and he panicked and went into the middle lane where we were. It only produced a slight fender bender. You get a very strange feeling when you look up and see a car flying over you. I could see the entire underneath of the car and it seemed that it took forever to pass over us. The driver fell out on to the parkway and we managed to get him on to the shoulder and cover him, he was in shock. The car had flown across three lanes, four if you count the lane it came from and several feet onto the shoulder of the road. That must have been at least 35 to 40 feet, if not more.

Plane Crash
Photo Source: FAA

The military is not immune to accidents and one of the most dangerous places is the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. One pilot had gotten into his plane and was readying it for takeoff. That is when he did IT. He pushed the wrong button. This wouldn't have been so bad, if it wasn't for the fact that the button shot a missile across the deck, sending the flight crews running for their lives. Warehouses can be dangerous too. The U.S. has an arsenal of some very powerful torpedoes. These babies should be treated carefully, after all they are capable of bringing down a huge ship. Well someone should have told the forklift driver to be more careful, when he was moving one of these things, because he rode right off of the loading dock, a drop of about 4 feet. Luckily the torpedo didn't explode and take out the entire place. One Army guy decided to take his tank down a steep hill. Even tanks have a limit on how much of an angle they can descend. Didn't he go to tank school? Well anyway, the tank slid down the embankment and landed up standing straight up with its gun propping it up. The gun had gone deep into the dirt at the bottom of the hill. In my day if you destroyed equipment like this due to carelessness, you had to pay for it. I wonder what a tank costs today?

Did you ever hear the expression "asleep at the switch"? I don't know if that is what happened in this case, but apparently the person controlling the track switcher didn't believe that. He allowed two trains to be routed to the same track at the same time. What makes this so bizarre is the fact that both trains arrived at the single track at the exact same instant which caused them both to push each other to the side avoiding what could have been a tragic accident. Instead they both merely side swiped each other and stopped, each over a single rail. One guy came out of a building to get into his parked car, but was astounded to find another car sitting directly on top of it. The car on top seemed to be in good condition, but the roof was slightly crushed on the bottom car. Somehow the top car had launched through the air and make a perfect landing on his car. The last weird car accident I want to talk about is the one where a poor guy was driving down an expressway, minding his own business, when a central air conditioning unit fell on his car and crushed part of it. Did it fall out of a truck going the other way, since there was no divider or did it fall from a plane that was transporting it? I guess we will never know the answer, but since it did crush the driver's side there was no hope for this poor person.

Well it just goes to show you, weird accidents can happen and especially in vehicles. This time I talked about mostly vehicular accidents, next time I write about weird accidents, I will try and find more personal ones.