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My First Real Wreck
Tue, 12/20/2005 - 2:51am — Chris
About 2 weeks ago, I had a Christmas concert, which included all of the choirs and philharmonic orchestra. Anyway, the Concert Choir was the very first to perform, and then we had more than an hour break where other choirs performed, before we came back out to sing the combined pieces. After two concerts of just sitting around and waiting, I decided to simply go home during the break for the third and final performance. It was snowing pretty heavily that night, and even worse, it was dreadfully cold. Anyway, on the way home, I noticed a pretty icy patch in a bend in the road right near my house. In fact, I was barely able to turn the car while on the patch; I basically had no control. But, I got home fine, and took a nice break.
On the return trip, for some crazy reason, I decided to go back the same way I came, back over that really icy patch in the bend in the road. This time I was heading north, looking to turn right at the bend. Well, sure enough, when I got to the ice, I was only going about 15 mph, but I could not turn. I tried stopping but by the time I did come to a stop, I was across the bend, into the other lane. Fortunately, I thought, I was stopped, so I could simply back up and try turning again. I looked to my right and noticed a car a ways off, so I figured the car would simply turn and go past so I could return to my own lane. Well, the car didn't turn and didn't stop, but instead hit me right in the front passenger door with his front right bumper. He had lost control of his car on the same patch of ice. Here's a little diagram I drew (pretty good, huh) of how the collision took place:
He only hit me at about 5 miles an hour, but it was right in a soft spot, so it made a nice crunching sound and did the damage you can see in the first picture. It felt like I was being hit in bumper cars. Also, the car ran just fine; you can't even tell from the inside that there was damage done. Even though it wasn't hard and no one was hurt, I'm very thankful Naomi wasn't in the car with me. Anyway, we both got out of the car, and talked it over. He was a very nice and reasonable guy, also a young husband, who lives up in Wyview. We both noticed that the road was covered with a thick sheet of ice that anyone would have trouble driving across. We were afraid we would get hit again just sitting there in the patch. We decided to just call our respective insurance agents and see what they say. He had very little damage on his car - just a bit of paint scraped off the bumper and a broken headlight, so he decided not to even fix it.
Turns out we should have called a policeman, even though it was a pretty minor accident. But I'm glad we didn't, because he would have given one of us a pretty expensive ticket, even though neither of us was at fault. Anyway, I talked to my insurance agent, and he got my story, and then said he would contact the other guy for the story, and if they were in agreement, he would make a judgement on what percentage of fault belongs to whom, and split up the 500 dollar deductabile with those percentages. So it's definitely a costly error, but hopefully not more than 2 to 3 hundred. I kind of wish he had hit the other front door; we could have gotten the broken door handle and perhaps the broken power window fixed in the process.
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