Carmageddon

Carmageddon

It was the first day of the school summer holidays, the North West, the Midlands and London were draining their people on to the motorways as families headed South West to the caravan parks and B & B’s of Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. They were like the Scanwegian lemmings heading for that cliff or swarms of starlings wheeling in harmony through the sky, ready to emigrate at the change of the seasons, depending on your cynicism level that day. There were the clever ones who set off early and so got into the sclerotic traffic in the cool of the morning and the laggards who had a lay-in on the first day of the holiday and so missed the worst of the enthusiastic jam joiners.

            As they filtered out of the village capillaries and city streets to join the veins and arteries, the pressure built. This was not helped by under powered cars optimistically trying to tow overloaded and unbalanced caravans and four seater city cars heavy with holiday gear and surfboards on the roof to catch the wind and tug at the steering. The weekend travellers were on the road, their thin wheeled and walled houses swaying and lurching along behind them as they reached and scurried along the unfamiliar motorways, trying to work out, unsuccessfully, which lane they should be in.

            The gamekeepers, traffic police they called them selves now, lurked on their special ramps just off the hard shoulder or looked down with Olympian detachment from the bridges over the motorway, waiting to swoop down on their prey at the first sign of problems, picking off the weaklings. There were not many speeders today, there was no space, just many examples of reckless, dangerous and downright incompetent driving.

            The pressure was building as the traffic grew thicker, less space between each car, drivers fighting over that extra metre of advantage. Macho competitiveness increasing the temperature. If you have winners, you must have losers and those are the dangerous ones who try to cut corners.

            It was inevitable that there would be a crash. It could not be called an accident as it was predictable and predicted by the gamekeepers. They had seen it all before.

He was struggling to control his rig, the Renault Clio was not heavy enough to balance the twin axle, six berth Bailey Ranger. He kept it together until they left the Gordano services on the M5. The climb up the hill through the Tickenham cutting went well but then he started the down slope towards the Somerset Levels. The caravan behind him was taking control but it was still going well until they burst out of the protecting cliffs and felt the full force of the cross wind coming in from the Bristol Channel. The caravan lurched sideways and pulled the car with it, he over corrected and dragged the caravan back on track but the damper was not strong enough to handle the force and so the snaking started. The caravan pulled first one way and then the other. The snaking increased until the rig was out of control and he was helpless in the grip of the laws of physics. The spring-mass system was now in the grip of a simple harmonic motion. The caravan was now lifting each wheel off the ground in turn as it swung until the centre of gravity eventually went outside a wheel and it went over on to its side. The car was too small and light to handle this and so was taken over as well until the complete rig was sliding down the hard shoulder on its side, bits of plastic and plywood being ground off the ‘van and flying away in the wind until it came to a shuddering halt.

            Carmageddon.

            There was dazed silence in the car apart from the roar of the traffic passing and the screeching of brakes as everyone tried to stop. They looked at each other and found that no one was hurt apart from some grazes and bruises and a feeling of shock at the speed that the holiday mood had so nearly turned into tragedy. He clambered out of the driver’s door, which was now part of the roof. He lifted the others out and sent them behind the safety barrier. They looked back at the heap of fibreglass and plywood, mixed in with sleeping bags and packets of cornflakes, that was planned to be their home for the next two weeks. A toothbrush was lonely out in lane two, gently rinsed by the drizzly rain.

            All three traffic lanes Southbound were now blocked. The main artery from the Midlands and London down to the South West was now totally blocked on the busiest day of the year by a clot of cars, vans and caravans. It was a major stroke and the supply of nutrients to Devon was cut off. The clot fed back until the traffic was stopped at the previous junction at Gordano and, as with all strokes, the traffic started to bleed off into the surrounding tissues. Some drivers tried to fight their way into the services where they caused mayhem for the already overloaded facilities. Some just turned off, following the map to cut around the blockage, some just turned off, hoping to blindly find their way through the unknown maze of local lanes, Some, a little further back up the motorway took a chance and turned off to attempt to drive down the hard shoulder thereby causing a potential problem as the way through for fire engines and ambulances was totally blocked, potentially a murderous act.

            Now the situation deteriorated. The motorway was totally blocked, even the Northbound was down to a crawl as drivers slowed in case there were obstructions on their side. There was no way through along the hard shoulder for the rescue vehicles to get to the scene, the local area was starting to seize up. The drivers near the crash eventually got together, cleared the wreckage off the carriageways and got two lanes of the motorway slowly moving again. The selfish ones blocking the hard shoulder barged their way back on to the main lanes and the emergency services eventually got to the crash site.

            Two hours after the crash, the traffic on the motorway was moving slowly but steadily and the jam was slowly clearing. It was like aspirins clearing a blood clot, slowly reviving a patient that, hopefully, had no permanent damage. The roads in a twenty mile radius were completely gridlocked, taking about three hours to clear. The locals, as usual, had wisely stayed at home where possible, they knew what happened on these mad gaderene exodus days.

            Just another Saturday morning on the M5.