Head-On

This Blog Post was originally published on the platform "writelier" (formerly "co-writers" and "200wordsaday"). Sadly the blogging platform was discontinued. I downloaded all my blog posts and prepared them to be republish them here.

Recently I have written about accidents and driving. I was looking through the videos I recorded while driving an ambulance vehicle. Since recording is already a grey zone, I won't publish them, but I found a few precarious situations on them.

Also, I was reminded of a situation not so long ago that could have ended really badly.

My codriver and I were on our way to Graz with a sample of blood. It was an important drive so we were on our way without a patient and only with those blood samples. As the samples needed to be analyzed quickly our order was to drive with "special signals" (blue blinking light on the ambulance and a loud horn when needed).

After about 15 minutes of driving a really bad situation had opened up, if I would have reacted in another way. I was driving behind a car that was going slow and I wanted to overtake it, but I thought I will wait for the next curve to pass as it was quite an intransparent curve with trees on both sides.

The car made a sudden hard break, probably because the driver was frightened by our ambulance car. As I tend to hold more than enough distance when I'm driving "blue" I could slow down enough to prevent an accident.

Seconds after this, another ambulance car come on our side of the street. It was overtaking a car. If I would have proceeded to overtake myself at the time I wanted to, we would probably be in a horrible head-on crash. Since both of us would be ambulance cars with probably more than 100 kilometres per hour on the speedometer I think none of us four would have survived the crash.

Two vehicles driving against each other with over 100 kph is like driving 200 kph against a wall.