A Driving Situation

It’s the beginning of January. You just had a nice Christmas vacation with your family and now you are heading back to Lock Haven University. Your worry wart of a father got you an emergency kit for you to put in your car, just in case the foul weather gets the better of you. So you’re driving along route 80, the roads are icy, and you just want to get back to the college. Suddenly, a snow squall moves in. Everything is whited out. You are already going slow and you can barely see a thing. Suddenly you feel the car going off the side of the road, and before you know what has happened you are stuck in a snow drift along the side of the road. What do you do?

Thankfully your father got you that emergency kit and now is an excellent time to put it to use. First thing you want to do is put up road flares, to mark where you are, so that another car doesn’t come along, slip on the same ice you did and end up on top of you. After you have the road flares up, you go back to the kit and remove a collapsible emergency shovel. You’re going to want to dig a path from your tires to the road so you can drive back on. After digging the path, you get the bag of sand from the emergency kit and spread it under your tires so that you will have some traction. Finally you get back in the car, start it up, and with only a moment of hesitation, the car lurches forward and you get back onto the road, just as the snow squall is ending.

Now there are some things you don’t want to do. Don’t try and ram your way out of the drift, you may just get stuck deeper in the snow, and might trap yourself into the car. If you can get out, you may get stuck out and not be able to get back in. If this happens it would be a good idea not to go to the side of the road and try to signal to a passing car. They can’t see you just as much as you can’t see them. This will most probably end up with someone coming along, not seeing, plowing you over, not knowing that it was a human they hit, and then letting you there in the cold snow on the road to freeze to death because you are unconscious, or get hit by car after car until you are a frozen puddle of mush. Now we know what to do, and what not to do in this kind of a situation.