Note to soccer moms and minivan drivers: it's very dangerous to stop your car on a highway lane to check on your flat tire. It's much more safe and purdent to pull onto the shoulder or to put your flashers on and drive to the nearest exit.
She didn't pull over to the side but stopped in the middle of the road??? Prayers for the kids, but she was a total idiot.
18 Wheelers are a lot like trains.
They just dont stop that fast and if you do something stupid!
Since it was a tanker it could have been a LOT worse.
Good that the truck driver was able to keep a handle on it.
I wonder who reported the tire or if that's just a theory. The car could have just died. (Sorry. I can't think of another word)
Have you ever pulled over by the side of the road on a thruway or express way? It's very scary, the cars are going so fast. You're just seconds away from death. It's crazy to stop there. Go to the next exit or reststop if you can.
We swam in Y states last year in Flushing. How sad that the whole competition should be marred by something like this. That's really going to shake everybody up. The competition was always friendly as far as I could see; kind of like a big family. The kids often had friends on other teams that they'd see a few times a year at meets.
I don't understand why she wouldn't have pulled over on the shoulder. The NYS Thruway has wide shoulders for the whole length as far as I know so this doesn't make sense..
Deserves today's Darwin award
The stupidity of these mothers is just mind-boggling. Local media are attributing the accident to the mother who was driving (who was killed, along with both her children) being "a new driver", while the mother sitting next to her, who had usually driven the group in the past, was an experienced driver. Truckers were frantically warning each other via CB radio for several minutes after the minivan stopped, until finally a radio-less tanker truck hit it. That was an awfully long time for the two mothers not to figure out that keeping the car at a dead stop in a lane of a fast-moving highway, was a very bad idea. And how experienced a driver do you have to be, not to grasp that this is way dangerous? They stopped due to a flat tire, not engine trouble, and it would only have taken a few seconds to get the car onto the shoulder.
This mom STILL doesn't get it:
http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/65690.htm
"I think, maybe, he's [the truck driver] tired, he's sleeping or whatever, maybe he's talking on the phone or he's not concentrating," Lao said. "I want him to understand that he took my lovely, very nice daughter. Why doesn't he drive carefully, and look in front of him?"
Needless to say, the truck driver has not been, and will not be charged.