Kitz Forum
Chat => Chit Chat => Topic started by: tickmike on May 26, 2022, 12:44:20 PM
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Good Brakes.
We went to see our daughter last week in Essex, She had booked a meal at her local pub/restaurant so we were driving over to pick her up in a 30mph area with five cars at the back of us, just passing the said pub then about quarter of a mile A Massive tree started to fall across the road :o Standing on the brake pedal the car stopped with mm to spare, our Range Rover Evoque stopped very well, I think in emergency braking situation the car also increases the braking force.
I'm glad the chap at the back of me had given me plenty of distance between him and me.
Because the tree fell at an angle across the road there was enough room to drive on once I had made sure there were no others coming down.
The problem was when trying to get back to the pub again the police had stopped all the traffic while a chap with chain saw was cutting it up.
I all my 50 years of driving I have never seen one acutely fall down, I have seen them already down.
My poor wife was looking down at her phone texting our daughter at the time :-\ I did not know she can scream that loud. :)
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Thankfully you were alert and able to stand on the brakes in time.
As you say its not an event that you would expect to encounter especially if there were no local environmental weather forces at play.
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That was lucky on two counts, you could stop in time, and the car behind stopped as well.
Reminds me of an experience back in the late eighties, early nineties, there we were happily travelling with the rest of the traffic in the outside lane of the M2 (I won't mention the speed but it was a 2.8i Granada Ghia - the square type), we were coast bound and came over the brow of the hill approaching the Medway bridge, suddenly the car in front shot to the inside lane, and there in front of us stationary across the outside lane at an angle was a car and two men looking at the flat tyre! I braked so hard my foot still hurt two days later, how we missed it and everyone in front of us missed I don't know. Just crazy they stopped were they were! I still vividly remember it to this day. No idea if anyone behind us hit them.
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It was one of those surreal moments and I can still picture it in slow motion falling down, glad nobody was coming the other way as it would have crushed there car..
The road was dry and the car pulled up very nicely and in emergency braking the cars brake lights flash on and off rapidly to warn others at the back.
It was not windy so why it fell down is a mystery.
It reminds me of another surreal moment many moons ago, I was just driving back from a day out with my parents, approaching an traffic island and the was an almighty bang and a bright flash on my LHS was an small electric substation and the transformer had just exploded and everywhere was in darkness, the transformers are filled with oil to help cool them, if the insulation in the transformer breaks down and arcing starts then the oil can catch fire and if the transformer safety devices do not work quick enough it can blow up, but that's very very rare.
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on my LHS was an small electric substation and the transformer had just exploded and everywhere was in darkness, the transformers are filled with oil to help cool them, if the insulation in the transformer breaks down and arcing starts then the oil can catch fire and if the transformer safety devices do not work quick enough it can blow up, but that's very very rare.
This seems a lot more common in the US with so many pole mounted units, presumably as they are exposed to the elements.
There's some spectacular videos of when the mineral oil catches fire on YouTube.
I'm a tad obsessed with the electrical grid, I mapped the local feeds on Google Earth as with Sheffield being built around the steel industry there's a beefy oil-cooled underground cable that goes from overheads near where I live, all the way to the city centre. That must have been a monumental undertaking at the time.