Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Car hit my wall

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Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 12-31-2013, 01:31 PM:

So I walk out my front door this morning and what's the first thing that I see? Skid marks and car parts on the sidewalk, and a hole in my wall.

I called the police and was told that the woman who did it had already reported herself so all I had to do was go to the police station and pick up the report to take to my insurance agent. Which I did, and was advised that this will be 100% covered by her car insurance so it won't cost me anything to have it repaired.

Then I got to go back outside and clean up the mess on the sidewalk, in -40 degree weather.

Oh well. It could have been a lot worse and really, if she must hit the building then that's the place to hit it. Further west and she would have hit the door; further east and she would have broken the window.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 12-31-2013, 01:55 PM:

All kudos to the lady for having the honesty to report the accident. A couple of years ago a BMW skidded on some black ice and buried itself in the front of a colleague's house. However, the small print of the insurance policy said that the policy was only valid if the vehicle was in a condition to pass an MOT test at the time of the accident: when the wreck was examined, they found that all four tyres were below the minimum tread depth. Therefore, the driver's insurers refused to pay, and my colleague had a three-month battle with her home building insurers to get them to pay. At one stage, it looked like she might have to remortgage her house to get it repaired. Her building insurers eventually sued the owner of the BMW for £85k - I bet he'll be checking the tread on his tyres more regularly in future!

Anyway, glad that it was only a minor bang-ding-ow and that you've got the insurance details. There seems to be some weird weather going on at the mo: intense cold in central Canada that is causing flight cancellations, snow chaos in the northeast US, rain, gales and flooding in Britain, and ... 70-degree sunshine in Southern California! [Razz]

Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 12-31-2013, 03:28 PM:

it's 81 degrees now and a very nice sunny day here in a Honolulu on New Year's Eve.
[Smile]

-Claude

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 12-31-2013, 11:25 PM:

I do live in fear that someday a drunk from the bar next door will put his pickup truck in "first" instead of "reverse" and plow through our front doors. (We have angle parking out front.) At least, I have the knowledge that our building would probably stand up to today's flimsy Detroit vehicles!

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 05-21-2014, 06:25 PM:

The front of my building had a tough winter. Shortly after I got the hole in the wall that I posted above, the city snow plow hit the front wall again, further along it just under the front windows.

So I had two separate claims to get it fixed, one with the vehicle insurance agency to get the first hole fixed, and one with the city to get the second hole fixed.

The carpenter that I hired to do the work showed up yesterday afternoon and as of now (a day and a half later) both of the areas are now repaired and back to as-new condition. He's going to split the bill between the city and the vehicle insurance outfit.

The comedy and tragedy masks that I had high on that wall (you can just see the bottom edge in the photo that I posted) apparently rotted out from the back and they fell apart when they were removing them to replace the siding. They didn't look too bad from the front, but I guess water got in behind them and destroyed them. Better to find out about that now than to have them fall off and hit someone.

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 05-21-2014, 07:42 PM:

Frank,

Why don't you just convert your theater to a drive-in and save yourself a lot of trouble?

[Wink]

(Come on, you've got to laugh when shit goes wrong like this. It's the only way to stay sane. [Wink]

)

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 05-21-2014, 07:53 PM:

Or maybe install a drive-up popcorn window.

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 05-21-2014, 09:46 PM:

Too many people apparently think it's a drive-through already...

Posted by Steve Matz (Member # 1890) on 05-21-2014, 09:53 PM:

The Police are also Public Servants; They should have delivered the Report to your Theater after the woman filed it instead of you having to drive down there...

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 05-22-2014, 12:28 AM:

Prob Canada have different Public Servant laws than down here in the States.

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 05-22-2014, 12:48 AM:

What, me drive? The police station is just one block past the post office, which in turn is only two blocks away from here. Since I walk to the post office every weekday to pick up the mail (no street address delivery here, everyone has a box number at the post office) it wasn't any hardship to walk one extra block to pick up the report, then walk two blocks back the other way to drop it off at the insurance agent's office.

That's one advantage of living where I do -- pretty much everything is within easy walking distance. I rarely drive unless I'm going somewhere out of town or have more stuff to pick up at the bus depot than I can conveniently carry. The bus depot is about the furthest away that I walk on a regular basis; never tried measuring it but I guess it's about a mile from here.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 05-23-2014, 03:39 AM:

Just out of curiosity....

But, I was looking at that picture and wondering if in Canada it's common to have something like an obligation to keep the sidewalk in front of your building reasonably free from snow and ice?

In Belgium and Germany, for example, you actually usually do have such an obligation. Although the execution is somewhat flaky at best in practice and many regions don't see that much snow in a typical winter. I also don't remember anybody actually getting a fine or reprimand for not cleaning their sidewalk, but if somebody falls and hurts him/herself on that particular uncleaned stretch, I'm wondering about the potential implications...

Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 05-23-2014, 09:18 AM:

City bylaws are different every where in Toronto it is 12hrs after a snowfall to have all ice and snow off the sidewalk yet when I'm in Edmonton most people dont remove any snow at all it just gets trampled into a hard mass

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 05-23-2014, 11:51 AM:

You still have snow? It must finally warm up around November first, ha?

Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 05-23-2014, 12:34 PM:

Hell, we're still getting snow here in the northern tier of New Mexico, the edge of the system that walloped Colorado last week;

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 05-23-2014, 12:42 PM:

Luckily that one missed us... Even the snow on the peaks is just about gone around here.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 05-23-2014, 12:46 PM:

I suppose Frank's situation is about the same as it is here, which is that sometimes it's virtually impossible to have the sidewalks completely clear and dry during the winter. Especially if it rains and then snows a foot on top of it during the night, which it did here several times this year.

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 05-23-2014, 02:15 PM:

The sidewalk in the photo I posted actually IS cleared off as much as it reasonably can be. A lot of what you see in that photo isn't really snow but rather water vapour that condenses out of the air and creates a layer of frost on everything from sidewalks to power lines. Sometimes the frost build-up on power lines can get so heavy that the line or the pole breaks; that's a common cause of power failures in the winter.

The city public works crew actually removes the snow from the sidewalks in the downtown area here after big snowfalls. They have a machine that they use to brush the snow from the sidewalks onto the street and then they plow the street and truck the snow away.

Sidewalk sweeper:

They use the same sweeper in the summer to clean dirt and trash off of the sidewalks as needed, and I think they have a grass mower attachment for it too.

Outside of a really big snowfall or an emergency of some kind, sidewalk and street snow removal here starts at around 3am. I sometimes hear lots of diesel engines revving and loader buckets slamming on the ground in the middle of the night in the winter.

I shovel the sidewalk myself if it's snowing just before showtime, and of course I have to keep my fire exit on the side of the building clear as well.

We get enough snow around here that the emergency services require specialized equipment for dealing with it, like a "snowbulance":

Other things like fire trucks and road ambulances are all set up with tow hooks so they can be dragged behind the plows if needed.

Winter is no joke in this area.

Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 05-23-2014, 03:05 PM:

Frank said "Winter is no joke in this area"

that is no joke spent to much time servicing theatres on the prairies in the winter

Posted by John Eickhof (Member # 323) on 05-23-2014, 08:17 PM:

That story reminds me of around 1999, I was home from traveling on service calls for a few days, we had a video rental store in our lobby, I came back from having lunch with my tech Phil Housh, parked in front and was greeted by my employee working the video store in hysterics saying there's a truck sticking through the wall of my left side theatre aud.! (a twin) I went around the corner into the alley and there was the back 80% of a pickup truck sticking out at an angle across the alley! (through a 16" brick wall)There was no one in the truck, so I looked over to the bank drive up window across the parking lot the truck obviously came from and they were flagging me in. By time I entered the bank, the police arrived, the manager pointed us to an elderly man waiting in line to do his banking, the officer approached the man to take him out of the line and talk to him, the guy replied "just a minute sonny, I have to do some banking" so we waited, he finally came over and was asked about his truck sticking out of the building across the alley!He was kind of unclear but replied "I don't know, I just remember parking and hitting the brakes and then 'boom' I stopped suddenly!" He was out of it so an ambulance was called to take him to be checked out, he was 89 years old! And apparently hit the concrete curb and mashed down on the gas instead of the brakes because there were acceleration skid marks all the way across the alley! My building insurance covered the whole thing and he apparently recovered but the Police recommended his driver's license be revoked due to his age and coherency! Meanwhile Phil and I wheel barrowed the bricks and rubble out of the theatre and put a 4ft x 8ft plywood patch on the outside wall and our 4 pm show went on! A couple days later I formed up the wall and poured it full of concrete! If he was a few hours later, we would have had customers showered with bricks and mortar! They were thrown a good 10 feet into the auditorium! Just another day in the theatre life!