Friday, December 3, 2010

From my Email: Truck Wreck

I got an email from my trucker friend this afternoon.. Thought I’d share it.. It’s pretty amazing and if anyone knows more about what happened, and where this happened, I’d love to hear about it!
Here’s what the email said:
TRUCK WRECK
Read the caption on the first photo, then look at the second photo.
truckwreck1Look at the picture above and you can see where this driver broke through the guardrail, on the right side of the culvert, where the people are standing on the road, pointing.
The pick-up was traveling about 75 mph from right to left when it crashed through the guardrail. It flipped end-over-end bounced off and across the culvert outlet, and landed right side up on the left side of the culvert, facing the opposite direction from which the driver was traveling.
The 22-year-old driver and his 18-year-old passenger were unhurt except for minor cuts and bruises. Just outside Flagstaff , AZ , on U.S. Hwy 100.
Now look at the second picture below...

truckwreck2

I wanted to know more… First of all, I wanted to know if it was true. So, the first stop was the Snopes website.  According to Snopes, the accident actually happened, just not where the email says.  (Apparently the email has been circulating for a while and somewhere along the line, the location ended up in Arizona.) Snopes says they researched the facts and found out that it happened on Highway 59 in Hurricane, Utah back on December 30, 2006.  Click on this link to get to their report. They’ve even got a satellite shot of the location of the accident along with the coordinates so you can look it up on google earth or some other program/website where you can enter coords and get a satellite view. 

Do you think that 22 year old driver drove a bit more carefully after the accident?  lol

I just came up with a screen shot from my Google Earth program... Check it out:
If you go playing around with the coordinates, take note of the direction the "N" is pointing in my screenshot... It took me a couple minutes to realize I was looking at it in the wrong direction when I first located the spot.. lol..  

Back again: I found more info.. Would you believe a CNN article from back in 2007?
Amazing truck crash photos spark Web debate