Shaun de Jager, a tow truck driver for CAA, blogs about the crazy, weird, and downright scary things he sees on our roads.

You would think driving for a living 12 hours a day, I would become accustomed to seeing close calls on our roads as a result of careless, dangerous and distracted driving. I guess to some extent I have. My racing background trained me to never panic when things go wrong, and panicking on our roads is by far the worst thing drivers can do. It often makes a bad situation so much worse.

Tonight was full of close calls though. I can’t even count the number of times I was cut off with only an arm’s length of clearance. Nor can I count the number of close calls I observed through my windshield as cars sliced and diced through traffic or attempted to change lanes without properly checking to ensure the lane they wanted to merge into was actually clear. Some of the worst culprits are those who try and wait until the last moment to get into a lane that leads to another highway. In their selfish attempts to save a couple minutes in a long line-up, they cut in at the front even if it means coming to a stop in their current lane. This forces other vehicles traveling at normal speeds to slam on their brakes to avoid or swerve around the car that has stopped in a live lane. It was a situation similar to this that actually made me hold my breath and prepare to witness a terrible collision and assist with the aftermath.

I had gotten a call to rescue a driver from the express lanes in the east end of the city. The details on my dispatch computer were sketchy as to what the problem was; something about lost lug nuts for a flat tire. Umm…ok. Once I got there things became clearer. I’m not sure how but all five studs that hold the wheel on where gone and the brake drum was damaged. Basically Don the driver felt a thud and some vibrating so he slowly eased himself to the shoulder of the highway. Luckily he didn’t panic and do something silly like swerve or the wheel would have come clean off possibly resulting in losing full control of his truck. He was also a race car driver. We recognized each other right away. Small world.

There was already another CAA wrecker truck on the scene but after trying for an hour to resolve the problem, I had been called out with my flatbed to simply tow him to his local dealership 80km away. I got my equipment ready and as soon as I started winching his truck towards my own, the tire nearly fell off. We decided it would just be safer to remove the wheel from the equation and I would drag the damn thing up on the remaining three. The brake drum was already ceased and been damaged anyway but we didn’t want to cause any damage to his fender or worse, have the wheel pop off and roll off into traffic. Before long his truck was loaded and Don was loaded in my truck along with his dog and we were on the road.

As we traveled along, we reminisced about our old racing days and I noticed at one point that about 500m ahead, traffic was slowing for a construction zone. There seemed to be a lane closed, although it turned out to be two of the three lanes. We were all being filtered into the far left lane and as soon as I saw this, I moved over one lane (I was in the far right at the time) into the middle one. I kept a close eye on my mirrors and turned on my beacon lights to warn traffic behind me to slow down so that I wouldn’t get hit from behind. I still had to move over one more lane but since I had several vehicles lined up behind me and slowed to a crawl, I turned off my beacon lights so as to not continuously blind drivers directly around me.

There was a silver Integra beside me to the left and I knew that I had to eventually get into that lane. There was nobody behind him and I starting thinking that this would be a good time to move over. But with all these cars behind me in my lane, I felt more comfortable waiting just a little longer. Call it a hunch. I directed my attention to the car ahead of me to the right that was nudging in front of me and once again leaving little space so I slowed even more to open up a gap (I was down to 5km/hr at this point). That was when the OMG moment started. My peripheral vision caught a flash of headlights in my left side mirror indicating that someone was coming up very fast in the left lane (the one I had just about merged into). I looked in my mirror half a second before he hit the brakes. I had just looked back there a couple seconds ago and there was nothing…but there sure was now. I saw the puff of tire smoke, heard that brief tire squeal, followed by a rapid secession of chirping rubber as the ABS did it’s job and I saw the front of the Chrysler 300M dive deep to the ground in the driver’s attempt to stop his car from slamming into the much smaller Integra. It was way too late though.

He must have been doing 120km/hr when he first hit the brakes and he needed twice the distance he had to stop safely. I raised up my arm in preparation to shield my face and eyes from any debris that would fly through my open window. I heard my passenger gasp in a deep breath as he too prepared to witness what was certainly going to be a massive impact but it never happened. At the last possible moment the driver swerved left on to the shoulder and missed the other car by less than half a metre. He passed two other cars and a semi-trailer truck while he continued his emergency braking on the shoulder. It was a perfect execution of the swerve & avoid exercises that we teach at the car control school. He did it all right. He may well have saved his own life and the life of the driver he was about to hit. Wait a minute though – did he really do everything right? Why hadn’t he slowed down earlier like the rest of us? Why didn’t he observe the changing road and traffic conditions at least 300m sooner like everyone else? Was there some form of in-car distraction? Was he falling asleep and snapped awake as he soared past the row of already stopped vehicles in the centre lane? Who knows, but one thing is certain, he wasn’t paying enough attention.

In hindsight, I’m so relieved that I didn’t merge into that final left lane when I was first thinking about it and held off for another couple minutes. If I had, I would have taken up a good 10m of the distance he needed to avoid a collision. There is no doubt in my mind that he would have gone right under the back of my truck and like most trucks, there is no crumple zone back there to absorb the force of an impact. We would have felt a serious thud in my truck and maybe suffered some whiplash but nearly all of the energy of the impact would have been absorbed by the other car. It would have been much like slamming into a solid, immovable object at a very high speed. Although to make the scene even worse, my truck (like most other tow trucks) has a wheel lift bar that sticks out from the back. It would have gone right through his windshield as the front of the car was forced under my truck. The scene would have been nothing short of horrific.

I have no doubt that in my call to 911, when the dispatcher asked if there were any injuries, I would have had to reply “One fatality but no other injuries. Yeah…I’m sure.”

Tow to Tow with Drivers: Scary Night originally appeared on AOL Autos Canada on Thu, 25 Nov 2010 04:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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