Oct. 7, 2011

Accident : On the way to a family Dinner

In a bid to keep the family close after our three oldest boys were married we decided to have dinner each Fast Sunday at one of our homes. We rotated homes as best as we could and on this particular day it was to be held at Ben’s home in Orem.

 For some reason that I don’t now remember we had one of Ben’s cars here in Mapleton so we decided to have Tia and Loren drive two separate vehicles and Marie and I would follow in the third, our family car given to us by Dave Nemelka a coupe years earlier. Our car was a Lincoln Continental and we had been having trouble with it for several months with it overheating and leaving us stranded. We had taken into the dealer several times, had the engine replaced after the radiator had blown on it when we were traveling to Mesa to photograph a wedding. We had not been able to depend on it after the repairs since that time. Tia and Loren left several minutes before we did and Marie and I left without Brittany since she was sick that day.

As Marie and I were traveling west out of Springville we got a call from Tia that Loren had been in an accident near 8^th North in Orem. She couldn’t tell if he had been hurt since he had gone down into the median and she was on the right side of the road. The traffic was very heavy due to it being the weekend after Thanksgiving and everyone was traveling home from vacations.  I, of course was worried about Loren and wanted to get there as soon as I could and the traffic seemed to be willing to let me since everyone was going in excess of 80 miles per hour.

As we approached Orem Ben called and I told him about Loren and then as we were getting close to 1300 south in Orem I was still on the phone with him and suddenly as we went under the overpass the traffic was coming to a rapid halt. I barely had time to react and avoid missing the car in front of me but the car behind me did not react and slammed into the back of our car and then pushed me into the car ahead of me. We made a little dimple in his bumper where apparently a rock was caught between our bumpers. However the car behind was badly wrecked and the air bags had deployed and injured the lady in the passenger side of the vehicle. I had mentioned to Ben just before it happened “and we are going to be in one too.” I had no more than gotten that out before the wreck occurred and he could hear it over the phone.

He and Jeff then jumped into a car and came down to see what they could do to help us. We emptied everything from the trunk of the car which just didn’t happen to have my camera’s in it since I had put them into the backseat as Brittany had not come with us and it was therefore open. Had they been in the trunk I am sure to this day that they would have been destroyed as well as the car, which was totaled. We rode with Ben and Jeff after completing all of the reports with the Highway Patrolman. (He just happened to be one of my former Timberline Staff members and we enjoyed talking for the few seconds that we had in between business.) The Highway patrol was busy as there was the accident with Loren, our accident and the three others within a few minutes after that a little further down the freeway on both sides of the road.  We had found out from Ben and Jeff that Loren was OK and the car would have been since ha had barely hit the truck in front of him as he headed for the median. Two inches and he would have cleared it. It did some damage to the Saturn but due to the construction method of those cars it only shattered the front right fender and came to about $500 dollars of damage.

It turns out that Tia would also have been in the middle of it except she had just changed lanes and Loren was trying to when the vehicle ahead began stopping leaving him only enough time to move to the median to prevent getting hit from behind.

We had an interesting family, late, family dinner that night at Ben’s. He also ended up having to take us home since we were unable to get a rental car until about three days later. The van served as our vehicle for the next few days.

Jeff had also been doing some message therapy work on an insurance adjuster prior to the accident and had explained how he always felt bad because he would see people always getting the worst settlement from their insurance simply because they didn’t know any better. He had explained to Jeff the steps to getting more and when it came time for us to replace the Lincoln we had been offered a little over $4,000.00 for it when it would take nearly $6,000.00 to replace it with a comparable vehicle. As it turned out we were given a little over $7,000.00 and were able to buy our Toyota Camry for about the same amount. I knew that the Lord and been watching over us since there were so many other possibilities of what could have happened to Tia, Loren, the camera’s and even Marie and I and Brittany had she not been sick. It took four months to get a replacement car

And the insurance covered a rental car for that period of time as well.  Plus due to the condition of the Lincoln we had also had several occasions to rent cars and drive them long distances which helped us to know the type of car we would want in the price range that we could afford at that time. We were also relieved to actually no longer have the Lincoln problems that had been plaguing us for the past year and a half prior to the accident. The Lord truly was watching over us in more ways that just preventing injuries to us and other family members.