Sunday, October 14, 2007

Scary time

Yesterday afternoon my parents, the girls, and I were coming back from the zoo. We were in the middle lane of 3 lanes (or maybe there are 4 lanes there, but there was one lane on the left of us either way) when we heard brakes squealing in the left lane right behind us, we looked back to see a jeep go off the road, up the embankment, fly up into the air (seemed really high, but I'm horrible at estimating distance so I won't try), in the air it went on over the embankment & down the other side, landed on the entrance ramp onto the southbound lanes and then "bounce" on into the median between the entrance ramp & 29S. There was another car on the entrance ramp that the jeep came close to landing on, but to my knowledge no other cars were affected (physically, it certainly shook us up, and I'm sure many others as well). I didn't see the jeep land on the entrance ramp to see "how" it landed, but based on how it was falling, it would have landed on either the top (I do think it was a hardtop jeep, but still . . .) or on it's "nose". We couldn't really stop because of how the roads are there, the ambulances and such probably could have gotten there sooner than we could by the time we looped around. And none of us have any medical training to help anyway. I did call 911 and it rang forever and when she answered it was with the question "911, are you calling about 29 and 40" so obviously lots of us were calling, which I assumed to be the case, but I figured better too many calls than none.

Anyway, pray for those people, it would take a direct miracle for them to have not been seriously injured, if not killed. And we are just SOOOO thankful that nobody else was injured, including us. Just a slightly different angle and they very well could have rear ended us OR landed on top of us (if they had "spun" different in the air and made more of a complete circle).

None of us saw what happened to "cause" it, seems like speed had to be a factor for the jeep to have gotten that much air, but I don't know what happened beyond that. I was looking online to see if there was any information on it, but not that I can find.