Accidents

This has been a good week. I have worked a lot, but my hours have, for the most part, been good ones, and I have had enjoyable shifts. Really there is not a lot out of the ordinary to report on, at least no that has directly involved me.

On Friday, the m/s Ryndam was in Seward again. I had stayed overnight there on Thursday, so I brought people back to Anchorage in the morning. In the afternoon, I went back to Seward, and then returned to Anchorage again. When I got to Girdwood, my Low Fuel light came on. That was the first time I had seen that light. Now, in a typical car, I knew I could make it back to Anchorage and refill. With a coach, I had no idea how long I had left to drive before I would be dead. I knew the D model coaches, which I was driving, typically get about 600 miles to the tank of fuel, so I quickly started thinking about all the places I had driven the coach since it was last fueled. I concluded that at that point, 40 miles from Anchorage, I had driven around 550 miles on that tank, and someone else had put about a dozen miles on that tank before me. I thought about fueling in Girdwood, which would have meant buying diesel out of pocket and hoping to get reimbursed. I decided to bypass the Tesoro station in Girdwood. There was one more fuel station about ten miles away, in Indian. I figured I would stop there and put ten gallons in if the coach struggled at all. The coach did fine, and I bypassed that stop too. At that point, I grabbed the wheel a little tighter and thought to myself, "I hope you can make it 856, its nearly 30 more miles!" She made it back to the yard, and I let her idle for a minute to help cool the turbo off before shutting down. The next day, Saturday, I was assigned to the same coach, and I checked the fuel log. They had pumped 150.3 gallons into the tank, meaning I had less than six gallons left when I had parked on Friday! That was close. I would have had a dry tank if I had gone another 30 miles!

I later learned that just moments after I passed Turnagain Pass on that last trip back from Seward, there was a major crash. There was a head on collision which was fatal for an 11 year old passenger in one vehicle. Several of our coaches were stuck for several hours on the wrong side of that crash. Since it was fatal, cleanup took a long time, because of the investigations that were conducted by the state. The cause was determined to be a bad attempt at passing someone.

Today I did airport shuttles, but I learned of another accident on the Seward Highway. I heard of it at about 7:00pm, from a driver who was caught on the wrong side of it. This one was near Girdwood, and was another head on collision, caused by alcohol. When I first heard of it, the drivers stuck in traffic had already been waiting a couple hours. When I got off work, at nearly 10:00pm, nobody had moved yet. It was another fatal crash, for at least two people, which means another investigation. The Seward Highway is one of the most dangerous highways in the world. I have driven that road hell over a hundred times, and never had any incident, although there have been one or two close calls. Nearly all the other drivers have driven it as often as I have, and yet none of our vehicles have been involved in any accidents on that road this season, which is nothing short of a miracle. As a fleet, we have logged hundreds of thousands of miles on that road in the past three months, with no incidents. That's more than lucky.