Page 3 | Do you have a That was Close moment?

Daleksatemyshed · 2021-05-05T17:58:28+00:00

Local news had a gas explosion in a house, terrifying footage of part of the house going up like a rocket, several people were hurt and the house is a complete wreck. Some years ago my DM (who was elderly with Dementia) turned on a couple of burners on the cooker but didn't light them, I arrived pre work to drop something off to a house reeking of gas! I got the house aired out and had a Gas fitter cut off the supply. Watching the news brought home how close my DM was to disaster and probably serious injury. I still feel guilty I didn't sort this before hand. Anyone else care to sooth my guilt?

stillcrazyafterall · 05/05/2021 21:48

Reading all these just completely reinforces my 'when your time's up it's up'. I am a total fatalist (is that the right word?) and have experience of those that have been killed by bizarre events and those that have walked away from things that should have killed them. It's quite comforting to me TBH.

Horehound · 05/05/2021 21:50

I stopped my friend from walking straight into the path of a bus driving at speed. We had made it to the middle of the road then were looking to see if the road was clear to get to the other side and for whatever reason he just decided to step out. I grabbed the back of his hoody and yanked him back. It missed him by a cm or 2!

TattyDevine · 05/05/2021 21:56

I was in my grandfathers Ute (Aussie thing "utility truck" - like a pickup truck) which in those days had no seatbelts apart from the driver and my brother and I were rammed next to him, me nearest the door, even though there was only room for one passenger.

I was about 8 I guess. I was used to being in my parents "normal" safe Volvo type car which locked automatically, had seatbelts, etc.

I was fiddling with the door handle and nearly opened the door as the car was doing about 80km along some windy dirt track in rural Tasmania and if the door had opened, as I was squashed in I would probably have tumbled out and possibly had life changing injuries or got eaten by a Tasmanian devil or some such 😆🤨

I just quickly left the door alone and sat up straight and careful and gave myself an 8 year olds talking to. Grandfather was completely oblivious.

Peanutbuttercupisyum · 05/05/2021 22:01

Driving a 5 hour journey late at night with DH and DC, everyone asleep. Exhausted. Suddenly a frantic flashing of lights from a lorry in the opposite carriage way WOKE me up. I’d fallen asleep driving. I don’t know how the driver knew I was asleep or what my car had been doing but it definitely saved us

hellywelly3 · 05/05/2021 22:04

I was in Charring cross hospital the day of the London bombings. My DH and ds had been coming to visit me by train every day from our home near Luton. That day they didn’t show up. The hospital was in chaos with them discharging patients and getting extra beds ready. All the mobile phone signals were down and DH wasn’t answering home phone so I knew they’d set off. The relief when they walked into the ward was unreal. My parents were coming to visit me and the had decided to all come together in the car! It later turned out if they had done the normal journey by train they would of been on the same one as the bombers!

LadyJaye · 05/05/2021 22:07

I was working in Regjeringskvartalet in Oslo in 2011.

I just so happened to have accepted an invitation from a friend's aunt, which meant I was out of the city that day.

schnubbins · 05/05/2021 22:10

I was walking to work one day in the mid eighties.I was passing a big building site where a massive crane was in operation.Just as I was passing the chain weighing tons fell off the crane and landed right in front of me .it missed me by three feet .I just carried on and went to work.

Thelnebriati · 05/05/2021 22:10

Toddler DS decided to bolt towards the deep end of a swimming pool, and I caught him by the back of his t-shirt when he had one foot over the water.

fiheka · 05/05/2021 22:10

I was knocked down as a child. I only had very minor injuries but was knocked unconscious and taken to hospital by ambulance. I saw the car just before it hit me and I knew it was going to hit me. I felt an incredible feeling of calm. Maybe this is what the mind does to protect you?

LoudNowSing · 05/05/2021 22:18

Another one...about six months after I passed my driving test (at 35), I was driving home to another county after a long day at work. Was driving downhill on a dual carrigeway, and had to take a curving ramp to get on the motorway. Forgot to change out of sixth gear, and went sliding across the ramp lanes straight on to the motorway. If there had been another car on the motorway at the time, we would have both been killed. It took me quite some time to get home after that one, although I never did tell OH about it.

MaitreKarlsson · 05/05/2021 22:19

@LadyJaye very lucky escape . I will never forget watching on TV that day. My DD was two months old, we'd just moved, the Oslo and Utoya killings were horrific.

Iamtheweedonkey · 05/05/2021 22:27

When I was about 7 I was on a family bike ride, my bike was too big for me. We were riding on a road and as I was going around a bend the bike started wobbling and I lost control. I fell off the bike and it landed on top of me, I was laying in the road with my head near the centre. I froze as a car came around the corner, saw me at the last minute and swerved, I can still see the wheels go inches from my head 40 years on.

My dh has had a number of car accidents, one where he hit the central reservation and spun the car into oncoming traffic. More recently he was clipped by a lorry, which made his car turn and pin itself to the front of the lorry, the lorry drove a fair distance before realising that a car was attached to the cab. Thankfully he was ok.

TheSunIsStillShining · 05/05/2021 22:27

couple of times.

we used to live in Iraq in the 80s. Multiple air raids, scud rockets coming too close/blast wave blowing the windows. One time when going to Kuwait, near Basra the Iranis have come in as far as the highway and the tanks were shooting at each other over our head whilst we tore through that part with record speed.
2 times air raid when in school and they blew up one of our buildings. The one with the swimming pool :( we also lost 2 tennis courts then.

Lost all my brakes on a bridge where 2 big curves were coming up whilst going 60 kph. had to use engine brakes. thank god for having a manual car at that point.

When ice climbing dropped the ice pick. It was attached to my wrist, but yet it managed to lodge itself into my arm. Ambo called, paramedics took it out. They said I was lucky that it only nearly missed some big nerve.

Plane emergency landing in Larnaca because the TU-154 lost one, then the other engine in the last few minutes. As a kid I loved sliding down the big yellow slide :)

Another emergency landing with a 8-10 person small plane when we got into a thunderstorm and the weather forced us down on a meadow in the middle of nowhere. Broke a wing landing it turned out.

BikeRunSki · 05/05/2021 22:33

The train service I normally got to school was one of the ones that crashed at Clapham Junction in December 1988, where 35 people died. It was a Monday morning and my lazy teenage bones had decided to have a few more minutes in bed, and go by bike.

TheSunIsStillShining · 05/05/2021 22:38

I remembered a couple more

family holiday - my dad was driving. 100 km into the 1500 km trip he got a blown tire and we spun out of control, landed on our top. All of us got out with minor scratches.

got hit by a car when I was around 10. I was cycling and thought I was faster. Wasn't. He got my rear wheel. All of my left side was scratched off by the gravel. Took hours for the docs to get all the rocks out

Badyboo · 05/05/2021 22:48

Smart bloody motorways for us as well. Coming down the M6 the car just died. Then 3 year old DS wailing in the back and what seemed like hundreds of near misses. A HGV stopped behind us, turned out he'd been radioed by his mate in another lorry. Christmas card friends now!

Cottonheadedninymuggins · 05/05/2021 22:56

My parents were hit head on by a woman from out of town literally sailing around a road where it's like a letter T (so one going straight across and one leading up to it - I'm not a driver so I don't know what it's called officially). She 'didn't see' the traffic lights. At that area there were literally like 4/5 sets because of the roads meeting. Luckily because my dad was just literally setting off from the set of lights that were changing he was at low speed and everyone was okay.

As a child my mum got trapped the wrong side of the train barriers as it had malfunctioned and not done the usual siren/flashing lights to say it was going down. Being an adult my auntie got passed but my mum didn't. My auntie was literally clinging to hr over the barrier as the train raced by and both of them felt the wind and pull from the train as it sped past.

LindyLou2020 · 05/05/2021 22:59

@lonel

Those smart motorways are fucking lethal. Who the hell came up with it? I know. I hate them. Alex

And they're not going away, far from it - but new, improved "safety measures" will be put in place. So that's all right then.......🤬🤬🤬

WhatWouldPhyllisCraneDo · 05/05/2021 23:03

When DS1 was a stroppy toddler he was refusing to cross the road to our house. We lived on a very very quiet road, 20mph limit but as it was narrow most people drove a lot slower. So we made the (frankly stupid) decision to cross over and let him follow. Only he didn't. Until a car came driving dangerously fast. I screamed "stop" at the top of my lungs at DS who was about to cross. Both he and the car stop and I practically flew across the road. I still feel sick thinking about what could have happened and DS is 16 now.

WhatWouldPhyllisCraneDo · 05/05/2021 23:06

Oh and when I was a teenager I nearly got run over walking to school because I was so engrossed in my book I didn't look where I was going. The car that nearly hit me was my mums friend so I got a total bollocking when I got home.

YesIReallyDoLikeRootBeer · 05/05/2021 23:07

A few years ago I stopped into Walmart to get a dress shirt for my son's school concert (I live in America). As I was leaving walking on the sidewalk that goes down the middle of the parking lot a woman hit the gas instead of the break. She came flying up on the sidewalk and crashed into a bush next to it. This happened only a few feet behind me. At first I was thinking "oh wow that was crazy" it was not until I got into my car it occurred to me if I had just been a few seconds slower she would have ran me over. I then started shaking uncontrollably thinking about how my son could have lost me because I made a quick trip to Walmart to get him a shirt.

Lovemydogsmorethananything · 05/05/2021 23:10

@hellywelly3

I was in Charring cross hospital the day of the London bombings. My DH and ds had been coming to visit me by train every day from our home near Luton. That day they didn’t show up. The hospital was in chaos with them discharging patients and getting extra beds ready. All the mobile phone signals were down and DH wasn’t answering home phone so I knew they’d set off. The relief when they walked into the ward was unreal. My parents were coming to visit me and the had decided to all come together in the car! It later turned out if they had done the normal journey by train they would of been on the same one as the bombers!

This made me cry Wow you're entire family.

spiderlight · 05/05/2021 23:11

Dh was driving us home from the park a couple of weeks ago after our morning dog walk. He went through a traffic light on green at a crossroads and a police van with blue lights but no siren came flying through from our left, through the red light, on the wrong side of the road. It had obviously gone round the traffic waiting at the lights, and how we missed each other I will never know. We both had to swerve to avoid each other.

Walking to school as a young teen in that hurricane that Michael Fish said wasn't going to happen. I passed the entrance to the local MOT garage with a big metal hanging sign, and a split second later the sign came down right behind me. I felt the whoosh of it. I remember wondering whether it would have sliced me in half.

NoProblem123 · 05/05/2021 23:15

I got off a bus and ran across a road when I was about 11. I didn’t see the taxi coming the other way. His breaks screamed and I ran into it side on - I leaned right on it with my whole body but trying not to put my hands on the glass.
He gave me a right bollocking. Everyone asked if I was ok, I couldn’t stop shaking.

WhatWouldPhyllisCraneDo · 05/05/2021 23:15

Just remembered another one...
Was at work and had taken some of our patients out in the car with a colleague. He was driving, I was in the passenger seat and closed my eyes during a brief and rare 2 mins of quiet. I opened them as we came round a corner and saw a cyclist that we were about to hit. My colleague hadn't seen them somehow. I screamed and he braked. We still hit the poor cyclist, but luckily it was slow enough that he could stand up and walk away, his bike was still rideable as well. I dread to think how bad it would have been if I hadn't seen him though.
(The same colleague mangled a wheel on the work vehicle the next week and the decision was made to ban him from driving)