Talks at school/college/uni that habe stayed with you
We have all had to sit through safety lectures at college, even school, but are there any that have stayed with you?
When I was 16, at sixth form college, my whole year group was taken to a theatre to watch a driving safety awareness show. We were all ages 16 - 18, expecting the usual "dont do this", "dont do that", but how wrong we were. It was probably the most unpleasent two hours of my life.
There were victims of road accidents there to talk to us, along with the fire brigade, police and paramedic services.
There was a dramatization of a car crash they had made, all on local roads we all recognised, with a group who we got to know, in the very well played out production, where the invetiable happened, and the up and coming football player lost his legs, one of the two girls died, and the other in a coma, where the driver whose fault it was only had minor injuries. It was a real graphic up close dramatisation, and we even had parents of dead children come in and show us graphic photos of their son or daughters crash.
It was absolutley horrific, and it had girls crying, we were even put into statstic groups, and about 80% of the room were "dead" if the statistics for the area covered the amount of people in the room at the time.
It worked, and everyone behaved on the way back to school. But it really was horrible.
Anyone else have a simmilar experience?
I didn't have to see a reenactment. At 6 or 7, I saw the real thing from the corner of my father's property. We lived on a curve in the road, possibly one of the worst in the county. The curve turned and dropped, so nothing could be seen from either direction and in the direction of the drop, much of traction was lost. In the direction of the drop, the tendency was to drift into the oncoming lane.
A drunk driver was coming from that direction at the speed limit of 55 mph (88kph). Another car, a station wagon, was coming from the other direction at the same speed. This was the mid 1960s so the cars were heavy. The drunk driver crossed into the other lane on the curve and they met head on. The drunk driver's motor was thrown into the back seat. He died instantly as did the driver of the station wagon. The woman passenger in the station wagon was paralyzed for life.
Everybody around heard the crash and came running. My older brother and I stood on the corner of our property and watched the aftermath unfold. My mother helped by directing traffic until secondary emergency personnel arrived quite a while later. Primary emergency personnel had arrived in a few minutes and were busy trying to save the survivor. My mother pulled us away after she was no longer needed. It was the middle of the day, so my father was at work as were many people.
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