I’ve been in plenty of car accidents before, and I’ve seen the aftermath of countless accidents, but yesterday I actually saw one as it was happening for the first time in my life.

I was driving downtown on this street with a lot of construction.  They’ve torn up the entire street to fix all the potholes, and I guess they discovered some damage to the water main underneath, so it’s just a real mess.  At the same time, they are trying to rejuvenate the area by fixing up a lot of buildings and building up new ones.  Anyway, the bottom line is that the street is a giant maze of orange cones, torn up streets, construction workers, bulldozers, dirt screening plants and so on.

I was stuck in traffic playing with my radio when I glanced in my rear view mirror and saw a car coming up behind me in the lane to my right.  I thought it was coming kind of fast, but didn’t think about it until I noticed that the lane next to me was actually closed-there was a construction worker right outside my passenger window-and I turned around to see what he was doing.  I guess he noticed at the last second that the lane was closed and veered to the right and into a lot under construction.  He tried to break, but couldn’t get much traction in the dirt, I guess, and didn’t stop until he ran into one of the dirt screeners, which left his car buried under a layer of rocks.

It was crazy because unlike the accidents I was in myself, it didn’t slow down.  It actually seemed to be going even faster than it was, like if I blink I would’ve missed it.

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