62 People Reveal Terrifying Moments That Nearly Cost Them Their Lives—and How They Miraculously Survived
About to cross the road and a car zooms past from the wrong side.
I was lucky. Very lucky.
This happened about a year ago.
I work as an installation engineer on large tanker vessels. I was installing a Torque meter on the shaft of a Chemical tanker.
I spent the first-hour explaining things to the Chief engineer, that I would need help from a member of his crew and that the shaft would be locked with the Turning gear and tagged out for 2 days. this should be no issue as the vessel was due to take 3 days to offload and be cleaned.
I get to the shaft and there isn’t much room. so I take up the floor above the shaft, sit on the shaft and begin attaching some sensors. I notice the crew member is being radioed in Korean (Korean crew), I don’t think anything of it until I notice he is gone. This is frustrating as I cannot work on the shaft alone due to health and safety, so I get up to go find him. as I get off the shaft I hear a huge jet of air and the engine fires up with the shaft engaged and turning Fast. I was so shocked as if I had been sitting where I was I would have been slammed into the surrounding metal by an engine that produces 5MWs of power on startup.
Bonus: obviously annoyed I went to “speak” to the chief, after explaining he had almost just ended me by removing two safety measures (including cutting a padlock off a breaker). he looked at me laughed and told me he had forgotten I was working down there.
I just picked up my tools and left the vessel, reported what happened to my boss and ripped up the Purchase Order and I took a flight home.
.
I was behind a car at a red light. It then turned green, the car in front turned right and I took a few extra seconds as I’d been turning on the aircon. As I took my foot off the brake another car (SUV) coming from the left (I’m in Australia) ran the red light doing the speed limit of 60km/hr. She slammed the brakes on and stopped in the centre of the intersection with a look of OMFG on her face. She was inches from hitting the car in front of me as he was turning.
If I hadn’t been fiddling with the aircon and gone immediately after the car in front that woman would’ve smacked into me, my passenger side, in my new car.
The next day I installed my dashcam which I’d kept forgetting to do.
I can’t be sure that I was a “second from being gone” exactly, but it was one of those moments that I really had to pause and think, and it shook me up pretty bad.
I used to commute about an hour each day to school via a main interstate, and one morning I was plodding along in slightly congested traffic in the middle lane of the three lanes. (I try to obey traffic laws and only use the left lane for passing only.) Suddenly in the left lane a loaded down dump truck flew past me going probably 90, and I remember yelling “You are going to hurt somebody!” in my car. About 15 seconds later, brake lights are all illuminated in front of me and we come to a stop.
That dump truck had rear ended a small vehicle and there was hardly anything left of it, it looked like pieces of tin foil were scattered in the road and wrapped around the axles of this truck. And the air smelt like burnt rubber. I pretty much cried for the remaining 45 minutes of my drive that morning, thinking how easily that could have been me. The part that is burned in my mind the most is that the man’s shoes (the driver of the small car) were in the road pretty far from his car. It just drove home the point that, man, there was definitely a human being in that wreckage.
Sorry for the downer but I guess it’s hard to have a happy story in a thread like this. I guess to extrapolate a positive message from it, don’t drive too fast to stop, especially if you drive a big vehicle, and don’t forget that all those cars on the road are filled with people with families – so drive like it.
Tl;dr – Was in a lane next to a horrible wreck on the interstate, the driver’s shoes were laying in the road from impact and it really shook me up.
Wasn’t me that could’ve been gone, but I had a car accident with a pedestrian several years ago – he was running across a busy road near (but not AT) a red light (where there was no crosswalk anyway) but I was driving up the turning lane to make a left so I was in motion. He was running between cars and came out of nowhere – hit my passenger side, bounced off the top right side and shattered that corner of my windshield. If I’d been a second or two behind, he could’ve been actually run over.
As it was, he begged my forgiveness and refused the ambulance (presumably no insurance)… and I had a two hour panic attack. Thankfully there was actually a cop car in the front of the line of oncoming traffic so they witnessed the whole thing, flipped their lights on and immediately took control of the scene, and vouched that there was nothing I could’ve done to avoid it. Scary stuff though, I hope that guy ended up ok.
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