https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vlu-gE2YhTE
If there's only one thing that really stuck with you from your driver's ed classes (remember those?), hopefully it was the importance of defensive driving. You might think you're the best driver in the world, but if you're not aware of your surroundings and prepared for any potential craziness to go down, then you could be opening yourself up to absolute disaster. The sort of disaster that goes down in the above video, for instance.
In this incident that happened in Houston, Texas, an 18-wheeler dump truck with an elevated truck bed barrels down a lane near the East Loop for several seconds before absolutely obliterating an overhead highway sign, sending ol' Downtown West into oblivion.
After watching the footage, you have to ask yourself: Did the dump truck's driver not know that his truck bed was raised? Because, there's no way he could have known that his bed was elevated that high and actually think that he could have made it under the overhead sign without causing some serious damage. But, hey, crazier things have happened.
What makes the video all the more terrifying is the reaction of the two witnesses who were driving behind the truck, since they were basically centimeters away from getting smashed by the sign. The whole thing is like a scene out of Final Destination.
While the actual incident happened back in August 2017, the video of the received more than 33 million views on Facebook only about a day after its release. According to initial reports, the condition of the driver was unknown. Here's hoping the driver made it out of that crazy situation okay.
This post was originally published on January 17, 2019.