A mangled BMW carrying a California mother, her 10-year-old daughter and 10-week old baby was suspended over a 100 foot drop on a Santa Barbara, CA highway. Here’s the newsclip. Please watch it.
The story revolves around the fortuitous arrival of a Navy Seabees forklift which was able to stabilize the vehicle, preventing it from falling into the ravine. The vehicle had been rammed into and compressed by an 18-wheeler which slammed into it and then fell into the chasm, killing the driver. The woman and children, trapped in the car, were teetering on the edge of eternity. According to the clip, the Santa Barbara County Fire Department had been on the scene and trying to extricate them “all afternoon”.
I’m real curious about what that must have looked like especially because the video coverage that began once the forklift was in place sent shudders up my spine! There were up to ten, maybe more, turnout-clad firemen clustered around and on the car, leaning on and into each other and the car, seemingly (or is it clearly?) doing NOTHING coordinated!
Here, maybe this will help…
Maybe the guy standing on the car leaning into the sheetmetal that was against the woman’s back (Helmet 30) was in charge. Do you think so?
Perhaps it was the guy supporting himself with his hands on the pulverized guardrail (Helmet 18). Or maybe it was the guy standing on the lift bent over with his hand sticking into a sliver of space supporting the woman’s neck (Helmet 24). Nah, it must have been the two guys with the red helmets (VMP1 and Unknown) who were grabbing the woman and squeezing her out from between two slabs of metal like jerking a slice of bologna out of a sandwich! But wait a minute, the guy on the forklift (Helmet 24) may not be supporting her neck, it seems he’s holding on to the metal that supports her for dear life as he is bending over and grabbing…is that the woman’s FEET? Holy Christ, that’s what they are!
Meanwhile, Yellow Helmeted Bass has his legs wrapped around the back of Red Helmeted VMP1. I guess that’s supporting him and helping him be more flexible as he so carefully maneuvers the poor woman. Well thank God Yellow Helmet 31 and Red Helmet T11 are there to back HIM up. I was beginning to worry there weren’t enough personnel available to do the job right!
Let’s see, I count six yellow helmets, three red ones, an extra shoulder, and wait a minute, way in the back is that a WHITE helmet. How stupid of me, and all this time I thought no one was in charge! And now I can glimpse the sliver of a black helmet as well!
Okay, so what do we have? Twelve bodies crammed into the space of a Volkswagen; it must be a Clown Car!
Okay, let me calm down here again. I need perspective. Let’s ALL look at the newsclip one more time.
Well, there were a number of shots, many of which were duplicated and quick clips but at least twice I counted no less than 12 Firemen literally swarming over the car and at least three times they repeated the sequence of Yellow Helmet 30 CLIMBING all over the metal that was wedged against the woman’s back!
To be perfectly frank, sick Bastard that I am, on first view of this clusterfuck I had to laugh because it felt so familiar! The only time I shit my pants in the field was when I was inside the cab of an overturned 18-wheeler on a Santa Barbara highway trying to start an IV on the driver who was hanging upside down, supported by a shoulder harness and by his legs which were wedged in by crushed metal. There was gas leaking into the cab and just outside of me, a cluster of my comrades-in-arms, the SBCoFD were setting up a circular saw to grind open the door and get us both out! I screamed out something barely intelligible like No! NO!!! Gas, the GAS!!!!! and God or Something interceded and the fact that I’m writing this today is testimony to the fact that there really are miracles in this world!
I’m so sorry, but I just have to look at the newsclip one more time.
Yup, there’s a Red Hat, now, LEANING INTO the pulverized concrete railing!
And the extended shot of Yellow Helmet 30 shows him not moving but HOPPING around on the metal of the car leaning on the back of the woman!
That’s it, I can’t look no more, I’m getting a hemmorhoid.
Remember I said the newsclip said the FD had been working “all afternoon” until the Seabees showed up? They must have been strategizing very, very carefully. They must have thanked God the Seabees showed up. Whoever must have been in charge probably exclaimed, “Okay, Boys, now we can jump all over the car!” Oh, I forgot, I didn’t see anyone in charge, or did I miss something?
Maybe all these years have made me lose perspective. Maybe I’ve forgotten how hard stuff like this is. Maybe I’m deluded that the way to handle a scenario like this would have been with two pairs of hands wearing surgical gloves instead of 12 pairs wielding sledge hammers, and one guy close by directing ancillary resources while one more did nothing but maintain crowd control and monitor scene-safety.
Looks like I’ve become a simpleton and once more in my life, since the woman, her kids and all the firemen survived, I believe there’s a God!
Why does this have anything to do with the supernatural?
Coincidences happen all of the time. When the coincidences are bad, do we look for supernatural explanations for the bad outcome?
Is the dead driver of the truck feeling blessed right now?
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He may very well be, Rogue! Such things I do not know.
This is said with no disrespect meant to his survivors, him, or to you!. Nothing takes away the tragedy to those left behind. And right now, we have all been left behind. Could the tragedy be precisely that? I don’t suspect he’s debating the issue; after all, isn’t it common to say “He has found peace” as if we know as long as we are alive, it is not to be found?
I happen to do that though. Yes, I thank the Great Mystery when I feel my ass pulled out of a sling. This has happened to me more times than I can count. I fall back on the certainty that I know nothing and am subject to being sucked into oblivion at any….
Bottom line, I get great personal comfort from thoughts like these, absurd as I may know them to be. And I know I will thank the God of my choosing now and at the hour of my death, Amen, for whatever it is that I have or had here on the planet.
I believe each of us is entitled to our own comfort as we define it. You find comfort in evidence-based medicine which, 100 years from now will have been found to be as false a God as the Golden Calf! My seeking Supernatural explanations is equally ridiculous. In terms of the long-term; everything will be overthrown.
My hope is that we can continue to have a sense of humor about it all and continue to do the best we can with what we’ve been given at any one moment. You DO laugh, don’t you? I happen to know you do about yourself, and over circumstances that personally, hit me as tragic, (I never lose sight of the fact I’m a Silly Wabbit!)
Besides, it’s all Supernatural. Didn’t it ever occur to you just how absurd and beyond our capacity to understand the whole mess is?
Given that, we DO look for Supernatural explanations for everything. If you have faith in anything, if you believe in anything, that’s what you are doing.
…and yes, given the circumstances of that call and looking at how the scene was (not) managed, I think it’s quite Supernatural that the driver of the truck was the only one called to meet his Maker!
firetender,
I have no reason to expect that science will be exactly the same in 100 years, but looking at what works, and can be shown to consistently work, is the way we learn about the way the world works.
Gravity, magnetism, and evolution were all explained as supernatural, even as proof of the supernatural, but they are clearly not supernatural. Some still believe these have supernatural explanations.
After 100 more years of science, we will understand far more about the way the world works, than we do now. I do not see that as any reason to assume that science will be overturned. After all, science is self-correcting.
Why accept the Skinner box world of superstition, where we end up spinning in various ways and pecking at a lever to receive some reward, because we have received the intermittent reinforcement of coincidence?
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A sense of humor may be one of the most important tools for a healthy life.
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Supernatural is just an explanation for what we do not understand. As we learn more, there will be even more that we do not understand. Many people will use supernatural explanations for these “mysteries,” but we will eventually understand them through science, because science is just looking at what works.
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If gravity stops working tomorrow, that would be evidence that science is wrong, but that would not mean that anything else makes sense.
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I do not look at a world full of disease and war and see that as evidence of ethical oversight. I do not see the random lottery winner (not killed in a way that encourages people to invoke mysticism) as a reason to believe in the divine.
This is like looking at homeopathy and seeing the people who were diagnosed with cancer, but did not die of cancer after taking homeopathic treatments, and assuming that the homeopathic treatments had something to do with the lack of death.
No.
The explanation is much more likely to be misdiagnosis (something that is too common and should encourage anyone with a serious illness to get a second opinion) or spontaneous remission. The magical memory of water is not even close to a more reasonable explanation, but some people see that as the explanation. Of course, they have to ignore all of the patients who were not misdiagnosed, who die a horrible death due to their reliance on magic.
With real medicine (science), there is a higher survival rate, there is effective treatment for most of the pain, and there is a limited (and increasing) understanding of what works, but it works much better than magic. With magic, there is no increasing understanding, there is no improvement in survival rates, there is no more pain relief than whatever can be provided by placebo.
The survivors due to misdiagnosis are not evidence of magic.
The pathetically low rate of survivors is evidence of the lack of magic. The good outcomes are just coincidences.
It wasn’t the magic that made anything not as bad as it usually is with magic.
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