Found this while browsing the front pages of US newspapers. According to The Olympian, a Seattle, Washington area newspaper, a 74 year old woman driving a station wagon drove into the side of a BNSF freight and was then struck by an Amtrak going the other way. She survived the actual crash, but later died of her injuries. This apparently happened sometime on Tuesday. No word yet on why it happened. Witnesses say the gates malfunctioned, but workers found the gates to be working properly…
I have an 83 year old Mother who is a pretty good driver considering her medical conditions and her age, and I appreciate how senior citizens get angry with the prospect of no longer being able to drive…HOWEVER, the fact of the matter is that eventually all of us will need to make the decision as to when our driving a motor vehicle is more of a danger to ourselves and others than it is worth. It sounds like the woman in this story may just have reached that point but ignored the signs and paid the ultimate price for her pride.
My 90 year old grandfather voluntarily stopped driving this year. We’ve been encouraging him to do so for some time. He came to the conclusion on his own when he turned a sit down restaurants front wall into a drive through. At least it wasn’t a railroad crossing.
The elderly aside, why are we seeing so many more grade crossing accidents lately? It seems like they are getting more and more frequent.
All the media attention to whether the gates were working or not gets me to wondering: if she didn’t see the big, bright orange locomotives, what are the chances she would see a thin 4" gate?
A transient ischemic attack doesn’t last very long and leaves no permanent effects.
Elderly people sometimes have them and experience blackouts which last only a few seconds or a minute or two.
In their attempts to rationalize why they did something that seems incomprehensible to most people they say things like “I hit the wrong pedal”, when in fact they have no idea why they drove through a barrier or into a building or into the side of a passing train.
What a shame. I would imagine that she had Alzheimers or some form of dementia. Sounds just like the kind of stuff my mother would do before we took the car away from her.
There lies the problem. It shouldn’t be up to the family or each individual’s decision. It should be controlled by the governing authority which is usually the issuing state.
It amazes me that we will issue a drivers license around the age of 16 and tell people “have fun until you die!” Drivers licenses should be re-evaluated and reissued at 10 year increments below the age of 50 and then at 5 year increments until 65 and then 2 years thereafter.
Giving someone a lifetime authorization to operate a motor vehicle that can weigh upwards of 3 tons at 80+ MPH until they deem themselves unfit for duty is ludicrous.
I agree with what you’re saying but, how is the government going to monitor this if the family doesn’t even know there is a problem? I lived 1,500 miles from my mother and had NO idea of the problems she was having. None. I had seen her a few months earlier and was clueless because I didn’t know the signs of her illness. I didn’t know that she was forgetting where she parked her car. I didn’t know that this lifelong neat freak was living in squalor. We had no idea that the local merchants didn’t want her in their stores because of her behavior. Unfortunately I’m now way too knowledgeable about these problems but until you’ve gone through them it’s easy to be ignorant.
My father lived three states away from me and insisted he could still drive when well into his eighties. When one of his neighbors phoned me one evening and told me she had found him sitting in the car at the curb and did not even know his way home. I called the state DMV the next day and they went to the house and personally took away his license. He was already well into his eighties and I feel his license should have been revoked years earlier. He was admitted to the VA nursing home shortly thereafter and he spent over a year their before finally passing this last January.
I loved him dearly but he refused to come and live with me (probably for the best). He was well cared for in the VA nursing home and the people who worked there genuinely cared about there patients. When the end was near they phoned me and I drove the 800 mile trip in time to see him one last time. For the last year of his life I drove to see him monthly and will always remember those precious times we had together. It makes me angry when I hear many of the stories about the VA. My father a WWII vet was well cared for by people who truly cared for him and that was in a VA facility.
I agree with you, macjet, but you would be amazed at how inefficient licensing authorities are at stopping people from driving. The court will suspend some sap’s drivers license, he or she will turn it in, then go out to the parking lot, get in their car and drive home.
If you think crossing crashes are common, start reading the traffic columns in the papers and see how often a driver with a suspended license is involved in a wreck.
It’s the old story; too many violators and not enough enforcers.
My 83 year old mother quit driving when she discovered that she would go into a trance-like state when travelling down the road. She still does when riding, but at least she’s not in control of the vehicle. Had she been stubborn, she probably could have continued to pass the test today.
The thing is, I could see this happening to somebody who was mentally capable. The woman may have been well and able to drive. According to the story, she hit the 3rd engine. Assuming the crossing did malfunction, I could see this happening to anybody depending on the speed of the train and the speed of the car.
At any rate, this is anothe good example of why we should all make it a habit to look for an oncoming train even if the gates and signals are off. Too many people just assume that if the lights aren’t blinking, and the gates aren’t down, no train is coming.
One cannot paint all Senior Citizens with the broad brush of incompetency. It can only be done on a case by case basis. The woman, that we are painting with the incompetency brush, was 74.
Paul Newman drove on the team that won the Daytona 24 Hour race when he was 75, and continued to compete in various racing endeavors until the past 2 years when cancer has overtaken his abilities. I had the opportunity to compete at race he competed at in 2006. I believe Mr. Newman had car number 81 on the car (he has used a car number corresponding to his age for a number of years), as I recollect he qualified 3rd in a field of about 12 cars in the fastest closed wheel cars that the sanctioning body races.
I hope my posts were not inerpreted as a statement that this particular woman WAS having TIAs. I merely was explaining why some older people have accidents that seem to defy logic.
Anyone who deals with people knows there is no magic age at which you are suddenly old and incompetant.
I have seen people in their 50s who were senile, and I have seen people in their 90s who were not. That was exactly my point that decisions should be initiated by someone who knows them, not some government agency that does not.
Nobody, certainly not me, is trying to “paint all senior citizens with the broad brush of incompetency”…I did not see anything that should give you that impression in these posts. Each person’s competency to drive (or anything else) should be determined on an individual case by case basis…nothing else is fair.