And the guy lived! Un-friggin believable!
Here's the story.
I had just gotten back from a drive through Santiago Canyon, which is a beautiful drive with nice long radius sweepers. A Porsche could easily do 120 MPH on the entire road if the driver chose to, but I chose to drive most of it at about 75 while I followed a nice BMW M3 and dragged a fellow Pelican behind.
Anyway, ever since I got new SO-3's in back to replace my old ones the car has felt a little bit squirmier than it used to with the old, almost bald SO-3's. Therefore, after my drive, I decided to stop by a buddy's place to ask him if I could borrow his '74 911 for a bit to test drive it and compare it to mine. Of course, he said no problem at all, so I hopped in and was gone. I was only going to drive it for about 15 minutes.
I finally get through heavy traffic and finally get the car out onto Trabuco Canyon Road, which is a really nice, tight, climbing tree lined canyon road about three miles long, at most. It's a great drive for the Porsche and really showcases its talents. I was lucky and had the whole road to myself. Excellent! I picked up the pace a bit, but not too much because my friend's car feels slightly different than mine and I'm not quite used to it (the old, non boosted brakes mostly) and, most importantly, the car's not mine!
I'm making a nice pace up the road and I start to see a big dually pickup truck a few turns ahead. He's moving fairly quickly but I close to within 40 to 50 yards in short order. The next thing I know, he shoots off like a rocket and takes off! I'm thinking, "Wow, that guy's really moving pretty quickly in this truck!"
Not for long! Within two turns he started to lose it and to my amazement he started to drop his right rear tires off the side of the road and into a ditch. A split second later he clipped a huge wooden telephone pole with the right rear and then all hell broke loose. He instantly tore off his right rear fender and had the back end kick out almost 90 degrees to the left, facing into the near vertical dirt wall. The front of his truck hooked the dirt wall and began to climb up the wall; all the while his truck was moving sideways. It almost instantly skipped on its tires and then flipped over and landed on the passenger's side, slid for a second or so and then flipped over onto its roof. Almost instantly the roof crushed in on the passenger's side almost all the way down to the window frame. Just before it stopped, a little 25 pound dog dropped out of the upside down pickup bed and limped away.
The truck finally stopped and I thought to myself that whoever had been driving it had to be in very bad shape. I pulled up alongside the now upside-down truck and parked crosswise across the road to block any on-coming traffic. My wife's a nurse and I remember thinking, "Damn, I wish Dawn were here right now, we need her." About that time, a couple of drivers that had seen and heard the accident after passing the other way turned around, came back, and had already gotten out of their car to assist. I looked into the passenger side and saw no one, and immediately told some other bystanders to call the 911 and then ran back to the truck. I came around the back side to see the two guys standing next to the driver, who was sitting on the side of the road, slightly bloody and very dazed, with his dog alongside him.
After talking with the guy for a minute or so we realized that the power was still on in the truck because his radio was still playing the CD he was listening to. So I crawled into the cab to shut it off and get his keys and was shocked to find that most of the cab had been crushed. How the heck did that guy make it through that accident!
Drunks have away of doing that because we started checking out the scene and noticed empty liquor bottles, some broken, some intact, strewn all over the place. OK, now everything was beginning to become clear. We had a drunk driver on our hands. A little while later, the guy actually started to kick a few of the bottles over into the creek bed below while we waited for the Fire trucks, paramedics, and CHP to arrive.
Of course, because I was the only real witness to the scene, I had to stick around and wait for the police to arrive so I could give a report of what I'd seen. All the while, I've had my friend's car now for over an hour and he's probably wondering what the heck has happened. Of course, wouldn't you know it; I left my cell phone in my other car at his shop, so I couldn't call him to let him know what had just happened. You should have seen the look on his face when I finally pulled up into his garage an hour and a half after I took the car from him. I told him "You are not going to believe what I just witnessed."
Anyway, that guy is now in serious trouble and his dog has been taken by animal services - and his truck is scrap metal. The guy is lucky to be alive and we're all lucky he didn't take someone out coming the other way on that tiny two lane road.
Drunken idiot.