[Healeys] Seat belts

[Editorgary at aol.com]

In a message dated 5/10/10 7:30:24 PM, healeys-request at autox.team.net
writes:


> Have you ever rolled a car?
> I have.  I flipped an MGB and landed upside down about 15 feet below road
> level.  I was wearing a ( lap and shoulder ) seatbelt with no roll bar
> and,
> while I know all accidents are different and one solution doesn't suit all
> circumstances, all I could see was a blur of spinning leaves and my life
> flashing before my eyes.  The forces acting on me did not allow for me to
> do
> anything except go for the ride.  I wound up suspended above the ground,
> tangled up in the seatbelt.  Just dumb luck, I figure.
> I'm not saying that hugging the passenger seat while wearing a seatbelt,
> isn't
> an option in some cases though.  I did just that
>

Did the same thing on Friday October 13, 1972 (you won't wonder why I
remember the date.) Early snow in Nova Scotia, and my first wife and I were
driving our Datsun 2000 home from holiday towards New York. About noon, coming
up
towards an overpass, we were t-boned by a young driver who had his license
for only three days, sliding out of control on the "bridges freeze first"
ice. Knocked us over the embankment, and we rolled two and a half times before
coming to rest upside down. As the car started to go over the first time,
all i could remember was thinking about all the effort I'd put in up to that
point in my life wasted in an instant.
At the end of it, my wife found herself hanging upside down, me unconscious
next to her (having knocked my head on the steering wheel), so she reached
over and started beeping the horn, then looked at me and realized I still
had my pipe in my mouth, so she removed that, thinking it would be silly of
them to find me dead with my pipe in my mouth (shock does strange things to
your mind). Once the handy Canadian road crew working nearby had rolled the
car over (by hand -- how many guys does that take?) they got me out, and I
came to as they were loading me into the ambulance.
Net result: one very totalled 1969 Datsun 2000, and lots of seat belt
bruises and sore muscles on both of us. Score two for seat belts, even in
roadsters with no roll bars.
Now I even put my belt on in the shuttle van going to the remote airport
parking lot.

Cheers
Gary