I wasn't in this accident thank God. I was a passerby. A fly on the wall waiting for the metro bus to come down pick me up. I don't drive and after this I probably never want to.
The engine was incredibly loud and obnoxious so I had to look up. I wish I hadn't. This old time beater Buick was barreling down the north road. This whole thing was frightening and surreal. The Buick, going south, ran a red light at the cross street I was standing at.
I guess the driver decided he was in a serious hurry and upon running the light he swerved to try and miss some parked cars and wound up slamming into a BMW that was making its legal right hand turn into a parking lot.
The force of the impact caused both the Beamer and the Buick to catch on fire. The Beamer then careened into a parked car while the Buick slammed and bounced around the street hitting at least three other cars with the speed involved.
As if that wasn't bad enough the flames from the two cars created a domino effect moving from car to car and taking out a few motorcycles that were parked by the bar. The only plus here was the fact that the cars were all unoccupied.
The bar emptied out pretty quick as well as other businesses just in case flaming debris would make everything else go up before the fire department could arrive. There was a homeless man sitting under an awning of a vacant building and he rushed to the flaming Beamer and tried to help the driver by pulling him from the wreck.
At least a dozen other people including myself wanted to help and wound up grabbing some fire extinguishers from the business that were nearby and used them to fight the fires from the cars to buy time to get out the occupants.
At the time we didn't realize that gasoline was flowing down the street. Sydney, the homeless man, had the driver halfway out when we had to get more extinguishers.
None of us could stand by and watch someone die. Not when you can actually help. Sydney was able to get him out the rest of the way and we took the man into the alley.
At this time the first groups of firemen were arriving on scene. One of the bar patrons, a former EMT, started CPR on the victim, but he wasn't able to saved. The man from the Buick was taken to the hospital and later charged.
After all the fires were put out what was left was a bunch of mangled, charred cars with onlookers in shock over the incident. I'm just happy that no one else was injured though it's still a tragedy.
I was going to be trying for license in a week that the day this happened but since decided I didn't like the responsibility in case something so unforeseen would happen to me someday. I couldn't live with such a thing looming over me.
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