When I was 18, I rolled my first car, a 1980 Honda Accord. First off, if you are ever in a rollover, I would highly recommend you do it in an old Accord, it rolls just like a ball. It was still perfectly driveable at the end, minus the windshield.
There’s a history beforehand that I think probably contributed to the whole thing.
We had a really nasty bug go through camp, similar to, if not the flu. It hit most people in the middle of the night; they suddenly woke up and had to puke. It lasted 24 hours or even a little less, and that was it, but it rendered you absolutely useless and helpless for the day. Even walking was too sickening a task to perform. It was very contagious, so a majority of people got it. I got it on the very last night of the planting season. I woke up at around 2-3AM, and had a good puke outside the front of my tent, and didn’t sleep a wink for the rest of the night.
That day I struggled to plant one box of trees (I can usually plant between 10 and 12 boxes per day). At the end of the day, since it was the end of the season, we had to take down camp. I was in no shape to do that, so I got permission from my supervisor to drive into town (about a 1/2 hour drive). Most of that drive was on a heavily used oil road.
For those that don’t know what an oil road is, in northern Alberta (and anywhere else there is extensive drilling), the oil companies build private roads everywhere, the majority of them gravel. Our planting company gets permission to use them. Oil companies don’t maintain their roads too well, but on a road that heavily used, they grade it twice a week, which still isn’t quite enough. This road had large potholes all over it from the heavy trucks that are back and forth on it all day. What grading does in this case is it fills the potholes with soft dirt and gravel, essentially making them invisible.
On this particular afternoon, they had just finished grading the road, and I had to drive almost 20 km on this road. The speed limit was 80 km/h (50mph), and I was driving about 75 km/h, so I was under the speed limit. I hit a large, invisible pothole, and the combination of the hole and the soft dirt in it caused my car to be put into a slight slide. After fishtailing down the road 2 or 3 times, I ended up sliding sideways into the opposite ditch, and right at the end of it all, just as I though it was basically over, my car did a slow 3/4 roll ending up on the passenger side. Nobody hurt, and once the tow truck put the car back on its wheels, it was still perfectly drivable (minus the one flat tire).
Ultimately what caused to roll was the bead breaking on the front tire and the rim digging into the dirt. I think the whole thing could have been avoided if I had done even just one of two things:
Drive slower. A 1980 Honda is not intended to be driven on gravel and doesn’t handle well at all on it. Even though I was driving slower than the speed limit, it was too fast for the car, and the condition of the road also called for slower speeds.
Don’t drive tired. I was exhausted from being sick and not sleeping a wink for most of the night. If I had been alert with good reactions, I’m convinced that I could have easily recovered from the initial slide. Unfortunately, being tired also tends to contribute to being impatient. Being tired should have been an indication to drive even slower, but no, I just wanted to get to town ASAP. Turns out if I had driven slower, I would have gotten into town much sooner.
