It was a Friday evening and I had collected my wife from her workplace in a town north of Valencia city. We were joining the A-7 for the trip to our home located twenty minutes inland of the city. Our son was returning home from a skiing trip the next day so we were looking forward to seeing him. The A-7 is always heavily travelled by trucks, but at that particular moment traffic was especially dense. Suddenly there opened a gap in the flow of trucks that allowed me to get on the motorway without causing danger to anyone, and so I did.
Once in the flow I was able to pull out into the left hand lane of the two-lane highway to get up to my legal speed of 120km/h. I had reached that speed when suddenly, and without any warning my engine simply quit. There we were surrounded by traffic, a long line of trucks on my right, cars and vans in front and behind us, all moving along at 120km/h, and we had been turned into a glider. Ever wonder what could have been the cause of those massive pile-ups that involve so much death and destruction on a highway with traffic all going in one direction?
What I did next would make the difference between life and death for ourselves and probably a lot of other people as well. What I didn’t do was panic. In fact I have never had such clarity of thought, not before or since the incident. Had I not got it exactly right I would not be here to recount this story.
It took seemingly an eternity for me to realize what was happening and to assess the situation as my mind could not accept that the car’s engine had shut down of its own accord, and in such a dangerous place. But there we were in the fast lane surrounded by all that traffic and we had to get across the inside traffic flow and onto the hard shoulder breakdown lane.
First step, activate the hazard flashers. The effect of that was all the traffic behind me immediately fell back. Secondly, indicate that we urgently needed to get to the right hand lane, and thirdly, sound the horn to be sure we had everybody’s attention.
I didn’t have to worry about the traffic in my lane ahead of us. They went on their way. I did have to work with the line of trucks to our right. There was a very long truck to our immediate right blocking our crossover. By sounding the horn I had got his attention and we made eye contact. Go! Go! Go! I signed. This man, who is the hero of this piece asked no questions. He simply sounded his great claxon and poured on the power.
And trucks ahead of him got the message and did the same thing. It seemed to take ages, but slowly he began to pull away from us.
We were losing momentum, but the fact that this was a flat stretch helped. As he inched ahead of us I began to pull across behind him, and as he saw this he did something that was a lifesaving move. He pulled sharply to the left to exchange lanes with us. This almost was our undoing as the suction effect of the great truck nearly pulled us into the rear, but I reacted quickly enough by softly braking to hold back. That opened up a huge hole for us. Now we could see what was ahead and we could pick a place to stop safely, which we did. What a hero that guy was!
As the gallery of traffic from behind who had witnessed the drama caught up and passed us there was much tooting of horns as in, “well done, and thank’s for not making problems for us!”
That’s when I completely went to pieces.
The natural instinct is to panic when something of this type happens, but the fact is, when we are in control of a vehicle, large or small, we are not allowed the luxury of panicking.
Death on the road? It doesn’t have to end like that!
Please don´t overtake on two-way road systems. Save your life for those who love you.
Copyright (c) 2007 Eugene Carmichael
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