Worse than that is are the smokers at the scenes of car accidents.
When the accident happens, people light up. I have no clue why, but they do. Then people driving by and running up sometimes have cigarettes, then sometimes tow truck operators show up and light up too.
Car wrecks are nothing but powder kegs of smokers igniting things.
I am reading a great book called “The Aviators” about Eddie Rickenbacker, Charles Lindbergh, and Jimmy Doolittle.
I didn’t know a lot about Rickenbacker(I knew he was our leading ace of WWI, a race driver, saved the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and was the head of Eastern, but man, he was one tough bird, I mean, knarly and nasty tough.
When he was the head of Eastern Airlines in the winter of February 1941, he was flying to Atlanta in a DC-3 (to do an inspection) which crashed in fog on the approach (hit some trees). The pilot, in his last act before the nose plowed in and buried both him and the copilot in the ground killing them, was to shut off the gas pumps.
Rickenbacker was pinned in the wreckage from 11:30 PM until probably around 10 AM the next morning, and was pinned in the wreckage with his face and torso crushed against the back of the corpse of the navigator the entire time..
He suffered a dented skull, other head injuries, shattered left elbow and crushed nerve, paralyzed left hand, several broken ribs, a crushed hip socket, twice-broken pelvis, severed nerve in his left hip, and a broken left knee. Most shocking, his left eyeball was expelled from the socket. His displaced eye happened when he tried to free himself by wiggling, hearing his broken ribs that had the shattered ends protruding from his torso snapping and popping, breaking more as he tried, and when he gave one heave with his head, he impaled his eye socket on a sharp piece of wreckage in the dark that he didn’t see, and poked out his eye.
While he was trapped, he heard some survivors outside the plane who were discussing lighting a bonfire to stay warm, and he had to scream (as best he could) not to light a fire, because there was gas everywhere and he would have been immolated.
But he didn’t die. Searchers eventually found the plane around 6:30 AM and had to cut him out of the plane. They hauled him out to the road, and they were loading dead bodies into the ambulance and drove away. When he asked why, he was told the state paid an ambulance $20 to haul a corpse, but only $10 to haul a living patient.
This happened in February 1941, and it took him nearly a year to get back on his feet. In October 1942, working for the government, just barely recovered, he was sent to the Pacific as a consultant to give pep talks to the military personnel, whose morale was very low, and their performance was suffering.
The B-17 he was in ran out of fuel, had to ditch, and he and a bunch of others survived adrift for 24 days, nearly starving and dying of thirst. One man died of his injuries in the raft.
His will to live was so strong, he would not let anyone else die (his force of character was that strong) that the others adrift with him grew to hate him so much they wanted to live just to spite him. One guy tried to commit suicide by going over the side, and Rickenbacker hauled him back in and tongue lashed him so severely with so much foul language that years later, survivors couldn’t bring themselves to repeat the words he used on the guy who he saved.
Man. What a damned tough guy. They just couldn’t kill him.
I recently came upon a wreck where the two vehicles ended up 3/4 mile apart because one fled the scene even though the airbags had been deployed and one wheel came off at the scene of the crash.
Seems like the ignition should be disabled if the wreck is bad enough to deploy the airbags, but I'm the cautious type.