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Friday night around 10 I was sitting in my living room reading when I felt a vibration, heard a loud "thump", and saw the lights go out very briefly. (I do not know in which order these things occurred.) Flashing red lights appeared pretty soon (but no sirens), and I got up to take a look out the window.
There is a large stretch of lawn between our house and the next building over (which is a small apartment building). Our house fronts onto one street and backs onto another, with maybe 100 feet between the two. There is a small hill up from the street to the houses on our side. Another street comes to a T intersection on our street, in front of our house. I see a lot of minor accidents there, as people coming down that street (down a hill) encounter people on my street who didn't heed the "opposing traffic does not stop" sign. (Traffic coming from that other street does have a stop sign, though; one of the two directions on my street does not.) The posted speed limit is 25MPH, so most traffic isn't going much over 30.
In the bad ASCII art, the X on the left is our house, the X on the right is the apartment building, and the * is where I saw a car, facing north. Surprisingly, the visible parts of the car seemed reasonably intact.
Saturday afternoon I saw somebody taking photos and learned the rest of the story. (There'd been police and firemen all over the yard the previous night, but I couldn't see much and you stay out of the way of emergency responders at work. Also, that yard belongs to the neighbors, not me.) Apparently the car came down to the T at a high rate of speed, drove right up over that hill onto the lawn (barely missing a pole and a tree, though the pole has electrical lines so maybe he grazed that and flicked our lights?), got airborne somewhere in there, left tire tracks and abrasions on the side of the brick building about five feet up, fell down on a row of air-conditioning units, bounced, continued forward, and drove over the other row of AC units, scattering their parts all over the lawn. The driver, who was not drunk, walked away.
Wow.
I see drivers speed down that street sometimes, and one of them smashed a car parked in front of our house once and pushed it onto our lawn, but I'd previously thought that our house, back from the street and up 11 steps, was safe from that. Now I wonder.
There is a large stretch of lawn between our house and the next building over (which is a small apartment building). Our house fronts onto one street and backs onto another, with maybe 100 feet between the two. There is a small hill up from the street to the houses on our side. Another street comes to a T intersection on our street, in front of our house. I see a lot of minor accidents there, as people coming down that street (down a hill) encounter people on my street who didn't heed the "opposing traffic does not stop" sign. (Traffic coming from that other street does have a stop sign, though; one of the two directions on my street does not.) The posted speed limit is 25MPH, so most traffic isn't going much over 30.
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*
X X
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||In the bad ASCII art, the X on the left is our house, the X on the right is the apartment building, and the * is where I saw a car, facing north. Surprisingly, the visible parts of the car seemed reasonably intact.
Saturday afternoon I saw somebody taking photos and learned the rest of the story. (There'd been police and firemen all over the yard the previous night, but I couldn't see much and you stay out of the way of emergency responders at work. Also, that yard belongs to the neighbors, not me.) Apparently the car came down to the T at a high rate of speed, drove right up over that hill onto the lawn (barely missing a pole and a tree, though the pole has electrical lines so maybe he grazed that and flicked our lights?), got airborne somewhere in there, left tire tracks and abrasions on the side of the brick building about five feet up, fell down on a row of air-conditioning units, bounced, continued forward, and drove over the other row of AC units, scattering their parts all over the lawn. The driver, who was not drunk, walked away.
Wow.
I see drivers speed down that street sometimes, and one of them smashed a car parked in front of our house once and pushed it onto our lawn, but I'd previously thought that our house, back from the street and up 11 steps, was safe from that. Now I wonder.