The accident

Last Thursday I traveled back to Iowa to attend my Uncle Linus's funeral. He died last Tuesday in a single car accident that to this day makes absolutely no sense to me and I think that is one of the things that is the hardest to accept. He didn't get hit by another vehicle and he didn't hit anything when he lost control of the vehicle. He shouldn't have even lost control of the vehicle. Yes, he apparently lost control of the car coming off an icy bridge but the area that he ended up sliding on was dirt...not ice. It may have been frosty that morning but it certainly wasn't sheets of ice.

The roads in Iowa are very open. One thing that I find fascinating about the Midwest is that the country roads are based on the township patterns. As you may remember from junior high history class, when that part of the country was being settled it was divided up into areas of land consisting of 36 sections of land. Each section was 1 mile by 1 mile therefore creating a 6 sq. mile township. The roads basically follow these square sections of the country and therefore are straight for miles and miles at a time. A good example is driving from my godparents house in Ridgeway to my Grandma's house in Elma. You take one straight road for about 15 miles and then take a hard left and drive another 3 miles or so before taking a hard right and driving the final 7 miles into Elma. My point is that the roads are straight and wide open. They are surrounded by corn and soy bean fields and the occasional farm house dotting the rolling hills. It's almost laughable because with good alignment in your vehicle you could pretty much set your cruise control and take a nap. Even if you went off the road you'd only end in a corn field.

Or so I thought.

Linus was traveling on one of those roads last Tuesday. Everything about it makes it a "freak" accident and everything about it should have let him walk away from it alive but a little bruised and battered. He was a cautious driver. Even my father, who can be so slow of a driver sometimes that even my mother tells him to speed up, used to joke that you didn't want to get behind Linus on the highway. He was also wearing his seat belt. He came off an icy bridge and somehow went off on the shoulder of the highway. He traveled approximately 100-150 feet, and appeared to be regaining control, when his tire blew and caused him to flip numerous times. The car landed on the driver's side and he broke his neck and died instantly (God, I really hope it was instant).

Below are some pictures from the accident site. It really doesn't look like much. You could easily drive by this site and never realize that something had happened.

In this picture I am standing where the car landed the first time it flipped. You can see the bridge that he was coming off of. The line of light brown dirt on the left is his tire track.

Here the dark dirt is his tire track at the only point where he started to go down the hill slightly. His right tires were just over the crest of the embankment at that point (the bridge is behind me in the picture).

In this picture look at the bottom left hand side of the picture. You can see the light brown dirt on the left which is his tire track and then the small pile of leaves and dirt at the bottom left corner of the picture is where his car must have gone airborne. His tracks stop there and about 5-6 feet further down the road there is lots of shattered glass where he must have landed the first time the car flipped.

This picture is taken with the bridge at my back. You can see the light brown track of dirt going from the bottom left diagonally towards the right before seeing the darker brown dirt shown in the 3rd picture.

Tire fragments:

More tire fragments: