Bizarre Accident on US-59 [Texas], Passenger Flown Out

Bizarre Accident on US-59 [Texas], Passenger Flown Out

www.polkcountytoday.com

Bizarre Accident on US-59, Passenger Flown Out, LEGGETT, July 30, 2010 - At approximately 7:20 pm on July 30, 2010, a red 2002 Ford F-150 driven by Dwight Miller, 51, of LaPorte, was north-bound on US-59 less than a mile south of Leggett when his passenger's side rear tire blew. Miller's vehicle left the road to the left and rolled. The vehicle came to rest upside down with the cab of the truck suspended in a sink hole that was not known to anyone before the accident.

(visit the link for the full news article)

Now, call it whatever you want, but this is one of those stories that makes you think, "Jeez, somebody or something was LOOKING OUT for that guy"... One of my cousins up in East Texas brought this story to my attention, as it's in the vicinity of my family's old hometown. I have stomped all over East Texas and only very seldom came across sinkholes — because Texas is largely an ancient seabed, right, a bed of compacted clay. There is a subsidence problem in the big cities, but that's because they're building these massive structures atop a clay bed and pumping the water out of the swamps.

What they're talking about up around Legget (where we used to go dove hunting) is a big-ass sinkhole off the side of the road, and this drunk dumb-ass Dwight Miller (who HAS to be related to me) FOUND the sinkhole by jamming the cab of his truck into it, upside down. Which probably saved his life.

— Doc Velocity

www.polkcountytoday.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by Doc Velocity


S/F for making me laugh tonight (not sure it's appropriate to laugh at the poor guy) but your recount of the events was enough.

I can beat that at a party I was at one a guy stepped out onto the road and got cleaned up did a full 360 in the air landed on his feet-and didn't spill a drop of his beer.

Originally posted by anglodemonicmatrix
I can beat that at a party I was at one a guy stepped out onto the road and got cleaned up did a full 360 in the air landed on his feet-and didn't spill a drop of his beer.

Yeah, but when he came down on the ground, did he land in a sinkhole or did crude oil start squirting up between his toes? Because that's the next page of the story... Yeah, drunk dumb-ass rolls his truck, injures his passengers, but is SAVED, I think, because the cab wasn't smashed flat, because he discovered a flipping SINKHOLE...

Heh heh heh

I mean, this will be made into a movie some day, and I want Nicolas Cage to play the drunk dumb-ass.

...and, yes, I hyphenate dumb-ass, because there's a reflective pause between dumb and ass.

— Doc Velocity





[edit on 8/1/2010 by Doc Velocity]

Interesting to say the least.... Truth be told I am not sure how "bizzare" I find it though... Lucky as can be that the landed in a sink hole... Absolutely.... But.... Yeah, it happens...


I also don't find it that odd that it had not been found before... It is a sink hole on the side of a small road in the middle of nowhere...I've been in that area many times ( I am from Texas) and it is nothing but forest on either side of the road.... It's not hard to believe that no people had been through to find it...

Not to me anyway.... But that said, I am so glad that both are okay, generally speaking.

reply to post by Doc Velocity

Too bad Ted Kennedys no longer available for the role.

Originally posted by gimme_some_truth
I also don't find it that odd that it had not been found before... It is a sink hole on the side of a small road in the middle of nowhere...I've been in that area many times ( I am from Texas) and it is nothing but forest on either side of the road.... It's not hard to believe that no people had been through to find it.

Well, the "bizarre" nature of the story is that the guy and his passengers did not have their brains exploded all over the cab of the truck because they happened to fortuitously land in a sinkhole.

That's a bizarre turn of luck, for sure.

I'd like to know more about the sinkhole, myself. I've studied the geology of East Texas out of necessity, and I know about the coal layers and the odd and spectacular rock beds in the vicinity of Leggett and Livingston and Lufkin... I've seen and collected the specimens of petrified palm trees in the creek beds, am I right, Mod? Oh, yeah, you know what I'm talking about.

Geologically, East Texas is kickin', baby.... People come from all over the world to explore East Texas geology. Moreover, anthropologists climb all over East Texas because of the many, many indian burial sites throughout the area, it's a constant source of conflict between the local government and the federal government and the goddamned looters who are desecrating the sites and selling artifacts on the black market.

Uh-oh, there I go again with exposing corruption.

But, before I started rambling about grave robbers, I wanted to make a point that East Texas is not usually cited for its sinkholes. Subsidence, yes. Sinkholes, no.

A sinkhole usually occurs when a fluid channel (a river, for example) deep underground disrupts and erodes the subterranean matrix, opening (even vacuuming) a cavity out of the guts of the Earth. This occurs, what, at about two or three hundred feet deep, in my repeated experience with the event. Big hole opens up deep underground. The massive weight of aggregate and other terrestrial components just drops like an elevator down a shaft, without a cable. Go boom.

Megatons of earth are dis-placed... And a sinkhole is the result.

And that is what struck me immediately about the story, that here was a little sinkhole in East Texas. Back in East Texas, we have stories about a subterranean river that flows underfoot and down to the Gulf. There's supposed to be a river down there, under Leggett and Groveton and Trinity, but it's never been substantiated.

— Doc Velocity






[edit on 8/1/2010 by Doc Velocity]

The vehicle came to rest upside down with the cab of the truck suspended in a sink hole that was not known to anyone before the accident.

Now that's just downright weird. And yeah it does make you think...

I wonder who the 'Saint' of Sinkholes is???

*Off to Catholic Website* lol

peace

Originally posted by silo13
I wonder who the 'Saint' of Sinkholes is???

Ummm... Seriously?

It's Saint Barbara. I kid you not. Saint Barbara is the patron saint of geologists and things of that nature.

— Doc Velocity

Drunks almost always get less injured then non drunks because they don't tense up and brace during a crash they just go with it like gumby because well they are drunk.

[edit on 1-8-2010 by hawkiye]

That whole region, from Florida, down the Gulf coast and across to the Yucatan and beyond seems to be largely limestone. The whole of the Yucatan and into Central America is peppered with cenotes - fresh water pools - many of which are linked by underground caverns and water systems.
It's interesting to think that a few thousand years ago, many of these systems were above water too, before the ocean levels rose after the last ice age.

I'd expect many more of these sinkholes will open up as time goes by due to subterranean erosion. Interesting stuff though and frightening to think you could be pootling along in the car one minute and swallowed up by the earth in the blink of an eye.

[edit on 1-8-2010 by Britguy]

So, now I've got to know if there is any non-local simultaneity between a possible Divine Intervention in East Texas and Santa Barbara, California... Is there anything weird happening in Santa Barbara?

— Doc Velocity

Originally posted by Doc Velocity
So, now I've got to know if there is any non-local simultaneity between a possible Divine Intervention in East Texas and Santa Barbara, California... Is there anything weird happening in Santa Barbara?

— Doc Velocity

It's California... everything and everyone is weird!

Second line just cos I have to have one.

Well, the only thing that sticks out at me from Santa Barbara is that FOX News is saying the Gulf Oil Spill Lacks the Transformational Punch of The Santa Barbara Oil Spill of 1969.

So, Santa Barbara (Saint Barbara) IS in the news in California, and Saint Barbara may have intervened and brought this drunk dumb-ass's truck to rest in a geological anomaly, thereby saving lives.

Wow.

— Doc Velocity

reply to post by Britguy


Yeah, a limestone seabed. That's Texas. That's the "bones" of Texas, as a geologist would say, if he was from Texas. Atop that, lots and lots of clay and swampland, the new kids on the geological block.

God, when I look at Texas through the lens of Geology, I'm just fascinated.

— Doc Velocity

reply to post by Doc Velocity


Nature and the natural world fascinates me no end.
My corporate travel profile is set up so I always get a window seat, allowing me plenty of great views on my travels. While everyone else seems engrossed with the in-flight movies, I've got my face pressed against the window or I'm taking photos of the landscapes, pondering the forces that shaped the valley's, mountains or plains below.
I often wish they'd bring back airship travel, nice and slow so I'd have longer to study the landscapes from the air.

Not sure why this would be so bizarre as stuff like this happens daily in the Netherlands

Of course there is lots more water and ditches in that country.

www.google.com...:en-USfficial&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi&bi w=933&bih=555

94,100 pictures to be exact.

reply to post by hawkiye


I have heard this before and i read a few reports of drunk people falling from great heights and being OK if i remember correctly even a skydiver who's shoot didn't deploy and survived possibly because of alcohol consumption

Originally posted by Britguy
While everyone else seems engrossed with the in-flight movies, I've got my face pressed against the window or I'm taking photos of the landscapes, pondering the forces that shaped the valley's, mountains or plains below.

I take photos and videos of the landscape from on-high. Flying into Aspen, Colorado on the airbus from Denver is a geologist's dream ride, I think... It's on the approach to the Continental Divide, so here are these titanic forces at work across the landscape, and I'm pointing from one to the other, trying to interest my wife — "Look, honey! That's an igneous dike over there, and you can see how it submerges and reemerges repeatedly across the entire length of the valley!!"

Wife: ZZzzzzzzz

— Doc Velocity




[edit on 8/1/2010 by Doc Velocity]