Not at all a pleasant thought.
How to play cornhole.
Corn Toss / Cornhole Playing Field:
Posted on 07/03/2004 8:51:37 AM PDT by Theodore R.
Today marks 10th anniversary of state's deadliest traffic day; 46 died Associated Press
DALLAS (AP) — The moment is seared in Mike Scrivner's mind. The screams of children trapped in their burning van. The helpless feeling of a firefighter without water or a fire truck.
The retired Fort Worth fireman was off duty on July 3, 1994, when he drove by the wreckage of a van that had burst into flames after it was hit by a tractor-trailer.
Scrivner stopped, broke the van's windshield and pulled out the driver, her 22-year-old daughter and two 4-year-old boys. But he couldn't save the other two adults and 12 children under the age of 13.
That crash on Interstate 20 near Weatherford was one of several that happened on the deadliest day for motorists in Texas history. In all, 46 people died that day.
"It was a bunch of kids, and I wasn't equipped to help them," Scrivner said in Friday's online edition of The Dallas Morning News. "I didn't have my fire crew, no water and no fire truck. The rest of them were trapped in there. You could hear those kids hollering and screaming."
Three separate crashes in less than six hours on that day took the lives of 31 people. Before that, the deadliest traffic day was Christmas Eve 1975 when 42 people died.
"To have three such accidents in one 24-hour period is just highly unusual," said Mike Cox, who was a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety at the time. "It was a very long, long day."
The first major accident happened early in the morning in West Texas, when Joe Carranza fell asleep at the wheel. His car hit a tractor-trailer that was overturned on Texas 158 from an earlier accident.
Three adults and three children packed into the Lincoln Town Car were killed. Carranza, 27, survived, as did his wife, who was 71/2 months pregnant with twins. The babies died, but they were not counted as part of the day's death toll.
Later that morning, eight children and three adults died when their pickup truck was hit by the cab of an 18-wheeler. The 27-year-old pickup truck driver apparently had failed to yield the right of way as he attempted to pull onto a highway near Snyder.
The Weatherford accident, however, was the most devastating.
Claudia Funches, 47, was driving her family from California to her hometown of Vicksburg, Miss., for a family reunion, even though her license had been revoked for driving violations a decade earlier.
After the van's shock absorbers gave out under the weight of 18 people and their luggage, Funches tried to drive along the shoulder to the next exit. When speed bumps made that difficult, she moved back onto the highway and was hit by the tractor-trailer.
The impact pushed the van 600 feet and ruptured its fuel tank, sparking the blaze.
Greg Bell and Ricky Wince, the two 4-year-old boys whom Scrivner pulled from the van, are now honor roll students, said Harvey Funches, Claudia Funches' son. They don't remember much about the crash.
"After they got a little older they started asking questions about it and now they know a little about it," Harvey Funches said. "Ricky would sometimes ask where his brother was and my mom would tell him he's in heaven."
The newspaper could not reach Claudia Funches for comment.
"Emotionally, I don't know how someone recovers from something like that," Harvey Funches said.
It was really unsettling on the interstate, but you just had to sort of find a truck's tail lights in the haze (I'm guessing visibility at under 50 feet) and bomb along at 75 mph like everybody else....slow down and you'd get cornholed.
Not at all a pleasant thought.
How to play cornhole.
Corn Toss / Cornhole Playing Field:
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