Was driving to Savannah on I-16 (or as I call it, the Devil's Highway) for a weekend getaway with some friends. I was in my car with my buddy in the passenger seat, following some friends in an SUV. We were passing the exit for Dublin, Ga., when we crested a slight hill.
I-16 is two lanes, with a grass embankment in between the two westbound lanes and eastbound lanes. The side I was driving on is higher than the opposite side. The grass embankment slopes gradually down at first and then gets steeper before flattening out, to form a valley of sorts and at the bottom, there's a metal guard rail. It's probably a good 30 feet (in total distance, not a 30 foot drop) from the shoulder down to the guardrail.
So anyway, my friends in the SUV are in the right lane and so am I. Immediately after the crest of the hill, there's a huge chunk of retread tire from a semi smack dab in the middle of the lane. My friend centers his tall SUV and drives over it, no problem. Meanwhile, I'm in a low to the ground Mazda car. I have no clue it's there until after he passes over it (I was following him sorta close but not like unusually close), and instinct just took over. I know they say you're supposed to just hit whatever's in front of you and absolutely don't swerve, but......instinct took over and I swerved to avoid it. Immediately kicked up gravel in the right shoulder of the road and then overcorrected to try to get back onto the highway. This caused me to lose complete control and fishtail back to the left, across both lanes and down the embankment. While skidding -- at 65 mph -- down the ravine, my car is hitting clumps of mud and grass and is bouncing. Somehow I managed to brake and slow myself down to maybe 40 while I'm driving sideways. Ended up twirling around so I was still travelling forward, but my car was faced the other way.
I somehow managed to not flip over, honestly don't know how other than by divine grace and the fact that I was in a car and not a truck or SUV. Anyway, still travelling at like 45 miles per hour downhill, I slammed flush (like parallel to the wall) into the metal guardrail at the bottom of the hill. Like I said above my buddy was in the passenger seat, which is the side that ended up slamming into the guardrail. My final thoughts that raced through my head right before impact was "Oh my God, I'm about to kill my friend. We're going to slam into that wall and he's going to die."
The car slammed into the guardrail and bounced a good four or five feet back away from the wall and came to a stop. Allignment, destroyed. Both tires on that side, shredded. Entire front bumber, shifted sideways. Luckily though.....and I honestly don't know how, he wasn't hurt at all and neither was I, not a scratch. The car also wasn't totaled.
The real miraculous part, though, was that there was no cars close to me when the accident occurred. Thus, when I skidded through both lanes, I didn't hit any cars or cause anyone else to wreck. That's what I'm truly thankful for. That's just divine grace that the other cars on the road weren't close enough to me for me to hit them. I was a lucky guy.
We waited 2 hours for AAA to come tow my car to the nearest town with a mechanic (Warner Robbins), and I hopped in my friends' car and we headed on to Savannah. And I got SMASHED to celebrate the fact I was still alive.
