What happens when you drive a toyota Corolla into a cow at about 20~30 mph? Shit happens, that's what!
At the time we were working in Lebowa. Formerly a part of the Transvaal province, Lebowa was one of the bantustans declared an ‘independent' country; except South Africa was the only country in the world that recognized them as such.
I'd driven the boss's car to a town to the north to meet with members of our fellow crew. We were surveying for Gencor, they for Anglo-American. Given the competition between the two, we were generally not allowed to mix and certainly not allowed to discuss where we were working.
After our social I drove back with one other crew member in the car. It was dark – there were no lights on the road and few cars passed us heading in the opposite direction.
About 30 miles from the camp, I rounded a bend at about 60 mph and my headlights illuminated a brown cow just standing in the road. I hit the brakes but what kept running through my mind was that I was going to hit the cow. I tried to move over to the right and the cow moved in the same direction. My passenger, who'd been dozing, heard me say, ‘Shit!' and sensed something bad was going to happen.
Whomp! I hit the cow pretty much dead center. It's legs buckled and it's body rolled up the hood and into the windshield. I saw it all in slow motion, not the split second it actually took.
In libya I'd seen photos of cars and trucks that had collided with camels. The camels were embedded in the passenger compartments having broken through the windshield with the force of the impact. Often this was fatal for the occupants in the front seat.
We were lucky. The cow shattered the windshield but the laminated glass held and the rolled off and onto the road. Where had it come from? The fields on both sides were lined with four-foot high barbed wire fences.
We sat in the dark and I scanned the instruments. The engine was still running and the temperature gauge showed the radiator was still intact and the cooling the engine. The ‘oil' light remained off. We seemed to be OK. What to do now? It didn't seem like a good idea to get out of the car so we set off once more.
Driving the last 30 miles was slow and tricky, since I had to peer through this broken windshield to see the road.
Somehow we made it back and I parked the car and went to get a few hours sleep.
This is how the car looked the following day:
The following morning I drove back to the scene. We could find where the impact had been but there was no sign of the cow! We figured some locals had carted it off as premium roadkill.
What made this incident slightly worse was that a few days later an executive from the UK came to visit to investigate a fatal accident we had had two or three days before my wreck. It was embarrassing to have to pick up the exec in a truck and then admit I'd stacked the boss's car.
The exec was coming out to investigate a rollover of one of our toyota hilux pickups. The driver had drifted off the edge of the highway – about a four-inch drop. In trying to get back on the highway he over corrected which resulted in the hilux barrel rolling several times. The unfortunate Jim Moeng who'd been riding in the back was thrown clear and died at the scene. The driver and the two passengers in the front all suffered broken bones. This is what their truck looked like when we recovered it:
Jim was one of two fatalities my crew suffered in South Africa. As a result of this accident, the company went and purchased crew-cab vehicles so everyone could sit inside and banned everyone from riding in the back of the hilux's. That didn't stop the roll-over accidents but we didn't have any more fatalities in later roll-overs.
