DonNC said:
CL... Thats tough. I do know the odd feeling of coming to after being knocked out...but mine happened in football, not a accident.
Did u get permenantly messed up ? How bout the other guys?
Thanks for the excuse to tell the rest of the story.
For me it was one of those life changing moments, partly because it was kind of a miracle that nobody got killed. There were three of us in the in the cab and three of us (me being one of them) sitting on the tailgate of the truck. That steep mountain road was cut into the side of a very steep mountain, it was only one lane wide and the downhill side of the road had no shoulder for most of the way and dropped off a 1000 ft or so. Certain death for all of us had the truck gone over almost anywhere along the road. The driver (one of bosses and owners of the outfit), who soon realized we were in deep $&*% when the brakes failed, took a radical approach to stopping the truck and tried to slow or stop it by turning the truck into the bank on the uphill side of the road. It sort of worked I guess, the truck jackknifed and flipped, throwing two of us, still sitting on the tailgate (one guy jumped off before the truck flipped), down the bank.
After being jogged back to reality by seeing the guy with the bloodied head, I got up and started to assess the carnage. It was then I started to feel an intense pain in my back. The guy with the bloodied head required stitches, the gutsy guy, who managed to summon the courage to jump off the tailgate before the truck flipped, ended up with a broken arm. Out of the three guys in the cab, who really stood the best chance of dieing had the truck gone over the bank, only one was hurt, and all he got was a cut and swollen lip.
Turns out the driver made the best possible decision to do what he did where he did it. Had the truck flipped anywhere else on the road it would have certainly continued rolling down the steep 1000 ft bank, but about half way down the hill the road had a bit of a turn to it (he never would have made that turn) and on the downhill side the mountain stuck out and had a bit of a shoulder. He steered the truck into the bank just before the shoulder, when the truck jackknifed and flipped it came to rest off the road on the edge of that shoulder and the steep bank. Had it rolled once more it would have gone down, but I think the truck loaded with the cedar blocks may have saved their lives. It probably slowed the momentum of the truck flipping, and when it landed it blew apart and splattered cedar blocks everywhere, kind of like how an egg hitting the pavement and splattering will stop suddenly.
I ended up with a severely bruised back (nothing broken YEAH!), but I was in pain for months after and found a new career choice. ;-)
Anyway, now I can say I had the experiance of logging old growth trees, something many modern (real) loggers have never done.