Jan. 13, 2012

Accidents : Rear ended a vehicles  

It is sometimes very interesting to me that I have not been involved in more vehicle accident than I have over the years. I have done a lot of traveling around the state and even across the country to New York and to California. I must give credit to this fact to the love and care of a wonderful Heavenly Father. I pray to that his loving and watchful eye will continue to be with my family and I. That is not to say that I haven’t been in accidents.

I have had one when taking girls on the fourth year hike to southern Utah, as well as one when going to work at Signetics late in the evening one night.

That is the story I am now going to tell and then maybe include the other one after it in this same segment of my history.

I worked for Signetics for four years on swing shift, three and a half years on day shift, followed by the remaining 7 on graveyard. I would go to work at two thirty PM for swing shift, six AM for days and ten thirty PM for graveyard. One night as I was headed into work I took a different route than somewhat normal. Most of the time I went in on the freeway but this time I went in on the old highway and then up on third south in Prove and onto University ave until I got to 1200 north in Prove which would take me into Orem to Signetics that sat at the top of the hill.  I was driving along that route this night and watching a truck that was ahead of me andf trying to keep a respectable distance. There was a store that sold piano’s near 400 west and 300 south that I looked over to see just as the truck then applied his brakes. There were some people standing by the crosswalk who couldn’t decide whether to cross or not but he had stopped just in case they did and I looked forward again with no time to stop. I was clearly in the wrong and as I hit the truck it pushed him forward to where he would have hit the pedestrians had they decided to cross which they didn’t. In fact we don’t know where they did go as we did not ever see them during the course of the accident again.

Anyway I smashed in the front and pushed the radiator into the engine but basically did not do as much damage as would have been expected. Marie had to come and get me and take me on into work where they were wondering why I was late by nearly a half an hour. We ended up getting the car repaired and were able to drive it for several more years. In fact Ben drove it delivering pizzas during his last two years of high school.  Again I had been blessed by the Lord in that I had not been injured nor had anyone else. The truck wasn’t damaged either since by applying the brakes on both vehicles carried my car under his bumper so that the car was damaged but not the truck.  It was just a good reminder to me to be more careful in driving.

The other accident I had mentioned came when I was transporting some of the young women to southern Utah in the Boulder Mountains where we were going for their fourth year hike. Sister Dahle had liked hiking the Box Canyon as it afforded a good 8 mile hike with the opportunity of staying over one night in the canyon.  We had hiked it one other time and found it a fun as well as beautiful place to hike and camp.  We were going through Gunnison and a road construction site when the accident occurred. We had a lot if stopping and starting and had done a lot of it when I was following another van driven by some people out of Arizona. I had looked over to see Molly’s Nipple, a lone peak near Gunnison that I had seen several times as we visited my grandparents in Centerfield. I looked back just in time to realize the van had started moving and then stopped again. I was not traveling more than 5 mph but when I ran into the van, again clearly my fault, it did cause a sudden stopping and the 5 gallon water container slid forward from between the second bench set and the van wall and came open drenching several of the girls with water. It bent the van hood back slightly to where I still have trouble getting it to open. Again no one was injured, there a was only a short delay as I gave the other driver my insurance information just in case he would need it for someone in his van that might later complain of whiplash injury or something. It was mostly just very embarrassing to me as the driver with 7 girls riding with me and my accident causing some of them to be lightly refreshed by a quick bath of cold water.  The rest of the trip went without incident except for some boys from an American Fork Scout unit that were the same age as the girls and just happened to be going down the box canyon as well the same day we were. But that is another story.