As I was driving home today in the rain, surrounded by drivers flying down the slick roads with their lights off, I looked up into the rear-view mirror.
There was a large van or SUV behind me. It took me a moment to realize that the truck was perpendicular to the road, and coming toward me fast.
As I watched horrified, it spun around a couple of times, then somehow it was airborne. It flew up and toward the north-bound lanes, which are on a higher level than the lanes I was in. It rotated around while in the air, like a gymnast about to land.
And then it landed on top of a sedan up there on the higher lanes, debris flying everywhere.
My heart was pounding. I instinctively grabbed my phone and called 911. I slowed, trying to stop, but the traffic behind me seemed to speed up as if to get away from the scene. I couldn’t stop.
911 answered almost immediately, and as soon as I said “Rock Creek Parkway” she told me to hold, that she’d have to transfer me to the Park Police.
It took nearly 2 minutes to get the call transferred, and the Park Police dispatcher told me they already had it. By the time I got a mile away, the Park Police cars were starting to come out of the side streets and race north.
As I sit here writing this, safe and warm at home, I have to question my own actions. Should I have stopped? Could I have helped? While I have some disaster training, I don’t have real first aid training and probably would have been in the way. And there is nowhere to stop and turn around on the portion of the parkway that I was on. I could have made the situation worse by causing an accident myself.
But I’m still sitting here shaken by the whole thing, wondering how badly people were hurt… or worse.
(I just found a traffic report on WTOP, it claims that the accident caused only a “low” impact on traffic. If that was low, I don’t want to see “high.” I hope that this means that it wasn’t fatal.)
