By: Jim Taylor

Airbags and seatbelts really do save lives


Death is never more than two seconds away on the highway.

        At 100 km/hr, it takes less than two seconds to cross a stream of on-coming traffic. To sail off the pavement into a ditch or over a bank. To smash into a rock or a bridge abutment.

        I used to know that theoretically. Now I know it from experience.

        Joan and I were exploring Newfoundland in a rental car. We were headed west out of St. Johns, nearing Gander, the town that became famous for its hospitality to stranded airline passengers on September 11, 2001.

        Rain was sluicing down, turning to sleet.

        The yellow centre line on the highway had been worn down to an archeological artefact. On rain-slicked pavement, it was almost invisible.

        Joan was driving. As we came around a sweeping left-hand curve, we somehow drifted across the centre line into the opposing lane. I looked up from my map into the headlights of an oncoming car.

        Joan yanked the wheel back to our side. The car slewed and rocked. When she corrected – probably overcorrected – the car snapped around in the opposite direction and spiralled across two lanes of oncoming traffic.

        If we had plowed into a logging truck, even another car, I probably wouldn’t be writing this column.

        But the only thought going through my mind was a sinking feeling that I wasn’t looking forward to explaining this incident to the car rental company.

        Then we slalomed sideways across the gravel shoulder, ripping both tires on my passenger side off their rims, and into the air.



Good Samaritans abound

Anywhere else on that stretch of highway, we would have rocketed into a rock wall. Or hurtled off an embankment, and crashed onto jumbled rocks 30 feet below. Newfoundland isn’t called “The Rock” for nothing.

        Luckily, we chose the only section with a bank of soft earth rising from the far side of six-foot deep drainage ditch.

        In slow motion, I watched my window disintegrate into a thousand crystalline fragments and shower into my lap. A great gout of muddy water surged up and fell in on me through where the window had been. And I watched the airbag deflate like a bombastic politician caught in a misdemeanor.

        At that point, slow motion ended. A bearded man wrenched Joan’s door open, and helped her out of the car. “Smoke!” he called, pointing the direction of the engine.

        I couldn’t open my door. It was crumpled out of shape, jammed against the bank.

        He held Joan’s door open for me. I scrambled across.

        A young woman was already on her cell phone, calling an ambulance. “I’m a paramedic,” she explained, “off-duty.”

        The bearded man sat us both in the back of his little red Kia, with the heat turned up high. We shivered, shocked. He wrapped his own jacket around Joan.

        The ambulance screamed up. Attendants strapped Joan to a body board, and immobilized her neck. A friendly cop took statements and arranged to have our car – definitely not driveable – towed into Gander.

        The Gander hospital X-rayed Joan’s neck and ribs. A nurse found us a local bed and breakfast to stay overnight. The B&B’s owner personally drove me to the wrecker’s yard, where I recovered our suitcases and other belongings from the battered hulk. The car rental company provided a substitute vehicle without question.

        Joan had some major bruises, but nothing broken. I had no injuries at all.



Divine intervention?

        “’Twas the grace of God!” exclaimed several Newfoundlanders, hearing our story.

        “Surely God must have saved you for some special purpose,” said others.

Maybe. Or maybe not. I don’t think God reached down a divine finger through those rain clouds and cleared oncoming vehicles out of the way of our spinning car, just so Joan and I could emerge unscathed.

        Why would God do that for us, but let others die in hideous pain, crushed in a tangle of tortured metal or barbecued in a flaming inferno?

        I do not believe that God plays favorites that way. Only arrogance would assume that I matter to God, and others don’t.

        Wouldn’t it have been a lot easier – and safer for everyone – for God to keep those centre lines painted? To create tires with better wet-weather traction? To reduce the rainfall a little? Or to imprint in all of us an instinctive ability to control dangerous skids?



God’s hands

Devout Christians used to ask Dr. Paul Brand, the famed missionary surgeon of Vellore, in India, if he had seen any miracles of healing. Brand usually responded by describing the medical techniques that gave leprosy victims the use of their crippled hands again, or that rebuilt eroded noses and ears.

        “No, no,” his hearers protested, “that’s human work. Tell us what God has done.”

        “Those are God’s miracles,” Brand replied. “God uses my hands.”

        So I certainly consider it a miracle that Joan and I survived our accident with nothing but bruises. But the miracle doesn’t require divine intervention that violates physics or biology.

        God worked through the engineers who developed seat belts and airbags, and other engineers who designed cars with crumple zones to protect occupants. God worked through medical staff who ensured Joan suffered no lasting damage. God worked through other drivers who stopped to help…

        If survival depended only on divine manipulation, then all their efforts were irrelevant. If it were all up to God, it wouldn’t matter if we have safer cars, better designed roads, more efficient hospitals…

        So I am profoundly grateful for seatbelts and airbags. If we had had that accident 40 years ago in our ‘62 Valiant, without seatbelts, airbags, or disk brakes, Joan and I would have been bloody hamburger inside a crumpled metal coffin.

        I thank God – and I mean that literally – that there are people who care enough to spend their lives making other people’s lives safer.

*****************************************
Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
*****************************************