Safe Speed Forums

Car crash driver dies in hospital

BBC News Sunday 2 December 2007

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/camb ... 123531.stm

A 31-year-old man has died in hospital at Cambridge after the car he was driving crashed into a block of flats.

The Volvo car left the southbound A15 Lincoln road in Peterborough on Saturday morning and crashed into flats on Papyrus Road in Werrington.

The driver was taken to Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge. A nine-year-old boy, believed to have been a passenger, suffered minor injuries, police said.

The driver and the boy are from the Peterborough area, a spokesman said.

Structural engineers were called in to assess the damage to the block.

Residents in one of the flats have been moved to other accommodation but no other flats have been evacuated.

Link to video clip

Local Live view

It looks like the embankment, in front of the flat, falls away to aim the car at the first floor.

a mundane accident with an interesting outcome ?

no speculation as to the cause ?

Well the car must have been going at quite a speed to end up in the first floor.

So now they want a reduced speed limit.

But surely no one driving sensibly would be going at such a speed when approaching a roundabout like this.

Was this driver speeding, or did he somehow misjudge the approach, or was he drunk.

Also why build flats in the firing line of a major road like this.

It raises some interesting issues about what causes such accidents and as you point out is all too typical.
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it is a little surprising there was no armco.... i guess road design assumed the bank & bushes would stop any ve-hicles.

there was a similar incident a while back where a car had hit the kerb fairly straight on and hopped up to ground floor window level to enter a house.

Looking at the maps and pictures, I dont see anything "typical" about this one - the flat is some distance from the road, and the most you would expect would be the odd artic rolling over and shedding its load in front of the hedge, or a boy racer making it through the hedge and onto the grass.

Anybody care to guess at the speed/forces involved to get a Volvo estate into a first floor room BACKWARDS?
Note also the nine year old boy survived with just bruises.

Perhaps the driver was taken ill at the wheel and pressed down hard on the accelerator after a heart attack or stroke - might even have been an automatic too.

I used to live in a house on a bend in the road on the A591 - in nine years we had about a dozen serious incidents, and only one resulted in injuries.
Drink featured in one, illegal speed, falling asleep and skidding in snow also one each. The rest were misjudging the bend and striking the wall or an oncoming vehicle. I dont see why you should not build close to a road as long as there is sufficient distance for a simple mistake not to end up with an impact.

New developments have to pass planning guidelines - mostly to do with screening from noise rather than impact!

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Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

Perhaps a lot less than you think.

A car at 30mph has sufficient kinetic energy to jump 30 feet vertically since 1.0g deceleration from 30mph to 0 takes 30 feet.

But to get back to an earlier speed we'd need to know the losses in the 'ramp system'.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Paul it may be more than you think, since only a small proportion of the energy is likely to be tranfered into vertical motion.

It does appear that the flat may have been at near road level, as it looks like the embankment falls away, so it may have been a case of near horizontal flight.

It is difficult to asses, but I think the car must have been travelling well in excess of the existing speed limit, prior to the roundabout, to achieve what it did, after crossing the roundabout. If so, then a lower speed limit, as has been called for. is clearly not the answer.
.

Erm, no.

It has no way of translating that kinetic energy into purely vertical movement. It may have the potential energy. Also, the 1.0g deceleration from 30 to 0 takes place in the horizontal plane. There is a further minimum 1.0g keeping the car on the ground.

I would suspect it is easier to get the back of a car up than the front, what with there being a engine in the front and the earth having gravity. But that's only a guess.

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Andrew.

I've been misquoted... I didn't write that!

I dont think the car has lifted much - the flats look to be down a bank, but I do think it required a fairly high speed to get it to fly, AND break into the property, given the requirement to get most of the way around the roundabout.
My point was this does not seem to have been a routine excess speed "accident" - more of a total loss of control - including speed, which is why I suspected a medical emergency - along with passenger survival.

Of course once it lifted off, all braking is down to drag and wind resistance. Oh, and a few bricks and mortar!

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Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

It does have sufficient kinetic energy. Which is what I said and is in fact a fact.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Paul is correct. It does of course assume a loss-less conversion (no deformation of components) and the car going straight up - which it obviously didn’t (it carried on into the house). The car going up at an angle would need additional speed but that would require a less than proportionate increase of ground speed.

That additional momentum would then be used to break through the wall and continue in. Let’s say it did so at 20mph; assuming a loss-less lift, that would translate to a lot less than an additional 20mph on the ground.

30mph can translate to 5 meters of (loss-less) lift (enough for 1 floor) and a residual 20mph to break through the wall. If provided with a ramp it would do just that.


I don't know the mechanism of lift but I suspect not much additional speed would be needed to overcome the deforming losses of lifting.

The BBC video showed the vehicle going partly around the roundabout.

However todays Daily Mail showed the roundabout, and apparently the car went straight over it, flattening the chevron sign and a small tree.
The flat was 15 feet above the ground, and the car somersaulted over 100 feet end over end, landing rearend first into the window and brickwork of the flat.
The driver was freed from the wreckage after half an hour, but he died later of his injuries.
Members of the public helped the 9 year old from the wrecked car.

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Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

It mystifies me how somebody can clinically describe the incredible amount of potential violence packed into a vehicle moving at 30mph on a site that has links to organisations that provide advice on how to get out of speeding fines or avoid them in the first place.

In a nutshell you have just identified one of the many flaws in our current over zealous speed enforcement. The message is drive at the speed limit and you are safe, whereas we can see this is not the case. This has always been my argument, I'm sure many on here agree.

I'm not sure why you think it is bad to have links to legal advice websites in relation to speeding offences, or are you suggesting that speeding offences be treated as guilty until proven guilty?

All entirely legal and above board.
There's no reason why a technical infringement (which is what the great majority of speeding offences are) shouldn't be met with a technical defence.

Because speed enforcement cannot mitigate that 'violence'.

That's at 30mph FFS.

What percentage of the road system KE do you think might be given up in crashes? (It's like a billionth of a percent)

What happens to the rest?

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

It warms your brakes up?

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"Politicians are the same the world over... We build bridges where there aren't any rivers." - Nikita Kruschev

It also crushes, bends and breaks bits of metal, scrapes rubber off the tyres in skidding across the road, gouges chunks out of the road or turf, knocks down bushes and walls, even crushes the occupant of the car.

I would suggest that most of the kinetic energy was dissipated before the car became airborne.

It may be possible to make some estimates from the conservation of angular momentum when it encounters an object, such a rigid kerb, which may have flipped the vehicle over.
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And it does so under the safe control of drivers everywhere.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety