Son sent me this video

[bob winter]

My son lives on what you would think would be a pretty quiet spot but a 16 year old female car thief from Montreal managed to pretty much total a house two doors down from him. Seems there is a good chance the place will have to be taken down, or he thinks so. Nobody was hurt and the car thief even managed to crawl out of the vehicle.

https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/driver-of-stolen-car-slams-into-ottawa-home-1.6384166

[JimD]

Re: Son sent me this video

Wonder if she had a license and if she missed the lesson on brakes.

[bluedog225]

Re: Son sent me this video

That sucks. I bet she’s back on the road in a year or two. Youthful indiscretion and all. Glad no one was killed.

[Nicholas Carey]

Re: Son sent me this video

Impressive. Hard to believe nobody was seriously injured.

[bob winter]

Re: Son sent me this video

I don't understand how the driver managed to get out although she did end up in hospital.

[birlinn]

Re: Son sent me this video

Hello- visitors usually use the front door.

[John Smith]

Re: Son sent me this video

I hope there's adequate insurance and not a fight between insurers.

[Rich Jones]

Re: Son sent me this video

Going by my construction background, I don't see enough damage to warrant tearing the house down.

This happened just down the road from me a few years ago. A drunk missed a curve and put his pickup in the living room of a house. It was 2 a.m. so the owners were upstairs asleep and not sitting in the living room watching TV.
The owner has now placed a couple of huge rocks to slow down any repeat performances.

[Hugh MacD]

Re: Son sent me this video

Going by my construction background, I don't see enough damage to warrant tearing the house down.

This happened just down the road from me a few years ago. A drunk missed a curve and put his pickup in the living room of a house. It was 2 a.m. so the owners were upstairs asleep and not sitting in the living room watching TV.
The owner has now placed a couple of huge rocks to slow down any repeat performances.

Same thing happened to a friend of mine. The car took out the end wall of the living room, crushed their couch and pretty much destroyed the space. Bedroom was directly upstairs. Driver didn't make it.

[Nicholas Carey]

Re: Son sent me this video

I hope there's adequate insurance and not a fight between insurers.

The girl driving the stolen car was 16 years old. Hope her parents have deep pockets — the insurers holding the policies on the house and the stolen car will be coming after her and her parents.

[Jimmy W]

Re: Son sent me this video

A number of years ago, a semi and trailer ran off the highway about a mile from my place and knocked a house about 2 feet off the foundation. A woman inside wasn't hurt, but house was torn down after that. It was a much smaller and cheaper house than the OP. The house was never rebuilt.

[bob winter]

Re: Son sent me this video

Latest news is that there is substantial foundation damage and the house is to be taken down. The contents are being removed as I type. Son tells me there is some sort of go fund me thing for the family - looks as if the insurance companies will be at this for quite a while and having Quebec involved won't be a positive thing either.

[CWSmith]

Re: Son sent me this video

I know 2 homes in my area where the road takes a hard turn. Both have LARGE rocks along the edge of the property designed to stop a car if the driver is not alert to the turn. Without them, only the front door would stop the car.

[Garret]

Re: Son sent me this video

Tough on the homeowners - I hope they make out OK.

In my home town a house was directly in line of a long straight stretch. Several cars hit the house (4 or 5 over a 3 year period) & the owners painted a giant bullseye (red circles on a white house) on the wall facing the road. They went 3 years without a person hitting it. Then one day a neighbor complained that the bullseye was an eyesore. The house was historic (built in the late 1700's) and zoning required that the house to painted with "period appropriate colors & design" - so the zoning board ordered them to repaint the wall without the bullseye. They agreed to - as long as the town would cover the cost of any damage done by a car hitting it. For some unknown reason, the zoning board agreed to this caveat.

Took a couple of months before a car ended up in the living room. The town refused to pay, but the homeowners had the signed agreement, took 'em to court & won. The town installed a guardrail after that.

On a completely different & unconnected note, and total thread drift, just around the corner was a church parking lot where the cops loved to park to catch speeders. I don't remember what the movie was (American Graffiti?) but some kids in it hooked a cable to the rear axle of a cop car, drove by speeding & the cop car took off after them, the cable tightened, & it tore the rear end out of the car. A couple of friends & I decided we needed to know if that was true.

It is. We had about 20 ft of slack in the cable, so he got up to a decent speed.

[Garret]

Re: Son sent me this video

To continue the thread drift, Michael Mason (mmd) sent me this:

It seems that American Graffiti inspired a whole bunch of copycats – me included.

The town police used to sit across from my home town’s only late-night bar, in the driveway of a house that had been razed for development of a federal building and surrounded by mature (100-ft) white pine trees. They had a clear view of the verandah and parking lot of the bar, and would wait until someone whom they suspected of being too far in their cups to leave the safety of the verandah and get in their car, then zoom out of their hidey-hole and bust the perp for a DUI. So, of course, we had to fix that.

As most of my friends were involved in the fishing industry, access to stout ropes was not an issue. So, 1-1/8” three-strand nylon rope in hand, one evening we put the plan in motion. We belly-crawled in from the next block through the now-departed house’s back yard, tied a bowline around the 48”-diameter trunk of a tree behind the cop car, crawled a bit farther to the back of the cop car, and tied a bowline around the rear differential of the car. A discrete signal with a flashlight from the bushes to one of our friends standing on the verandah, and the games began. Ted went haltingly and slightly unbalanced (all faked, of course) to his car, backed out of the parking lot and onto the street in front of the bar, and – bless his heart – lit that 440-cu. in. 1968 Charger up like it was the finals of the Winternationals. Stinky rubber smoke filled the street and the roar of the open-header big block was that of the wet dreams of motorheads everywhere. The cops instantly went into Smokey and the Bandit mode and banged the Dodge Polara into gear and the big 318 wheezed into action. The car lurched forward, gathered speed, and…

Ya see, 3-strand nylon rope is stretchy. Very stretchy. So the cop car gained a bit of speed, then reached the end of the slack rope. The rope took the load and as it stretched, the car slowed down, causing the cop to press harder on the gas pedal, which further stretched the rope. Eventually the tension in the rope overcame the traction of the tires, and after a very brief moment of stasis, the rope decided to show the cop car who really was in charge, and the rope snapped back, dragging the cop car with it, and imparting a not-insubstantial amount of rear-ward speed in the car. Enough that the forward-spinning rear wheels applied not a whit of braking action so the car smacked into the anchoring tree, putting a lovely and large tree-shaped dent in the rear bumper and trunk lid.

A lot of noise was made over that dastardly deed of vandalism, but the cops never again parked in that driveway.