Millennium madness affects accidents?
By: Drivers.com staff
Date: 2000-01-03
Even road accidents may have been affected by end-of-millennium craziness, according to reports from the U.K. office of an American insurance group. In fact, the accident that involved a rental car, a horse and rider, a dog and its pensioner owner and a motorcyclist garnered the company's accident of the year award.
It all happened, according to a story in the Daily Telegraph, when the driver of the rental car was forced to brake hard at a railway crossing to avoid the horse and the dog, which was on a leash. The motorcyclist crashed into the back of the car and the startled horse threw its rider into a hawthorn hedge before jumping over the roof and trunk of the car and bolting down the road.
Trying to help the horse rider out of the hedge, the pensioner tied his dog to a traffic barrier at the crossing-the arm was down and, presumably, a train was coming. Next thing he knew, the dog was being lifted into the air as the arm went up after the train passed. He released the dog before it choked, but the panicked pooch ended up biting the hapless motorcyclist.
In another bizarre mishap, this time in Wales, a man driving a rental truck was stopped by police, told he'd been involved in an accident (didn't he know?) and asked to report the incident at the local police station. On the way there, he was involved in three more accidents, hitting two cars and demolishing a lamp standard as he attempted a series of three-point turns. To add insult to injury, he was collected a fifty-pound fine for illegally parking outside the police station.
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