‘Early one morning not long ago, a municipal worker spreading road salt noticed damage to the dock at the end of Piermont Pier, a former railroad spur that juts a mile out into the Hudson River, south of the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge. A bent cleat, splintered wood. On closer examination, there were tire tracks in the snow leading to the mess. Surveillance footage from a nearby scientific-research field station showed a car launching into the water in the middle of the night. It also showed the driver bailing before the plunge, without getting wet. And it showed the car floating north, with the incoming tide, like a duck boat. Then it went out of frame.
‘"The thing is, the air bags went off," Daniel Goswick, Sr., a chief with the Piermont Fire Department, said recently, explaining the peculiar buoyancy. "I think it was, like, a knot-and-a-half current. We basically figured out the trajectory of which way it was going and where it would sink." That was the easy part. After three hours of conducting a grid search on a fire-department boat, using side-scan sonar, they located the vehicle several football fields northeast of the pier and thirty feet down. Retrieving it, however, required diving, which is a Goswick family specialty. "I dove every part of this damn river," he said. "Me, my dad, my brother, my son, my cousins--basically, all of us were divers. And now my granddaughter and grandson are coming up."’
So it didn’t keep the car afloat, but it may have reduce the sink rate. Damn I was hoping it was a new safety feature like self inflating pontoons or something.
… except in movies and TV shows, where they always portray auto airbags as a big fluffy thing that sloooowly inflates with the only noise being a soft “whooshing” sound, and then stays inflated, causing comic consternation for the driver. Those who are gullible might actually believe what they see portrayed by the entertainment media.
… and the “hit” has to be of the exact type that will cause a particular airbag to deploy. We have had a few ill-informed posts over the years that could be summed up thusly: I was recently rear-ended, and my airbags didn’t deploy. I’ll never buy this make of unsafe car again.
When my friend’s Accord was T-boned on its left side, only the driver’s side airbag deployed–as it should have. The front airbags and the passenger’s side airbag didn’t deploy–just as they were designed.
A friend was T boned in her car and no bags deployed. It only had the 2 front bags. No side airbags. She was upset the bags did not deploy. She was less so after I told her a side impact likely would not deploy the airbag because it might wrench her head and break her neck. Being a nurse, she accepted that answer.
Just a side note… a car will float for a while if the windows are closed just from the air inside the passenger compartment. Considering the airbags are completely INside the car, they don’t add to the float.
And deploy the airbags too. I wonder if something else wasn’t going on. When I hear about somebody jumping out of a moving car, I remember Rebel without a cause.
