A Serious Accident in the Evening

Pam and I were decom­press­ing over Jeop­ardy (on the TiVo) and get­ting ready for a late din­ner when we heard a crash.

Then we heard another crash. It was, I thought, like thun­der, but Pam later described it as a sort of scrap­ing of metal. That would turn out to be the more accu­rate descrip­tion. At about 8:10, a white truck came down the East­ern on-ramp to the Granville Bridge. That’s the one that is fed from the hill that starts at the inter­sec­tion of Hem­lock and Broad­way and actu­ally crosses 4^th Avenue at about a height of 40 feet or so.

It must have been the wet street (it had just rained pretty hard after a week or so of oil and other grime on the bridge). The truck spun out, crashed through the rail­ings (first crash), and went head-first down to the street below (sec­ond crash). When we arrived, along with all of the other stoney-faced neigh­bors and passers-by, it was clear that one pas­sen­ger was either already dead or nearly dead. We could see his arm, but not his head, hang­ing out of the truck’s white cab, which was smashed nearly flat against 4^th Avenue. The police and fire depart­ments had already arrived (even though it had been no more than 3 or 4 min­utes), and even­tu­ally pulled that pas­sen­ger out. The other was cov­ered by a tarp and had not extri­cated from the truck before we left and walked back home (a mere 500 feet away or so).

It’s been a vio­lent week in the South Granville area. Ear­lier, on Mon­day at about 10PM, a police­man shot a chain-wielding guy who had already beaten some­one else in the mid­dle of 16^th Avenue and Granville. As safe and peace­ful we usu­ally find our city (and that has been the case for the major­ity of the two years we have lived here already), it def­i­nitely feels like there has been a strange spike in death and mayhem.