Car Accident
Yesterday afternoon, on our way to run a few errands, Ponzi and I got into a car accident. Everybody's fine; there were no injuries. In fact, nobody's really to blame – according to the responding officer. I was driving.
We were headed down one of the “local hills” to an uncontrolled intersection (of which there are many in the Seattle area). The law states that the first car to enter the crossing has the right-of-way. Well, this doesn't account for when two cars enter the space simultaneously. So, I had slowed down to under 10 MPH – and circumstantial evidence seems to support this. Remember, I was coming down the hill – and anybody who knows me, knows that I'm a very cautious driver.
The next thing we saw was the other guy (and his car) moving in front of us. I slammed on the brakes, grinding to a halt. I wasn't moving very fast, but already, I was in the middle of the intersection. His car may have been to the right of ours, but we were seemingly there at the same time. Visibility to the right and left (from my original perspective) was 80% occluded. I could no more see him coming than he could see me – until we were right there.
No airbags deployed. No glass shattered.
His rear driver's-side door was crunched, but my front-end sustained minimum damage. Only an inch-long puncture scarred an otherwise perfectly-horizontal cluster of scrapes on my fender. We didn't hit him very fast, and we didn't hit him very hard. Still, we waited for the police to come – and that took about three hours, since we didn't have any injuries. During that time, Ponzi walked back to our house, came back, left again to get us some food from Taco Bell, then came back. The other guy was close to his house, too, and jogged back at one point to hit the little boys room.
Originally, the officer offered to forego the police report, but we each wanted him to do so, as that would likely make insurance claims a little easier to handle. No fault is fine by me – I'm just very thankful we're all fine, and that the only real loss was a loss of paint (and time).
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