There’s a reason why 80-90% of the fence applications seen by U.S. zoning committees are for privacy fences. Some neighborhoods are just a little too much to handle. Zany neighbors, though, can’t always be stopped by fences, as one homeowner in Grand Rapids, Michigan recently discovered.
At the end of May, an elderly woman crashed her car through a fence separating a CVS Pharmacy and a home’s backyard. The woman was in CVS’s drive-thru when she put her car in reverse, hit the gas, and sped through the fence and into the homeowner’s pool.
Fortunately, the pool had no water in it at the time, and the elderly woman did not appear to be seriously hurt. According to Grand Rapids Police Officer Scott Klawon, the woman was sent to an area hospital with “not obvious” injuries.
Police at the scene requested a crane to get the elderly woman’s car out of the empty pool.
This sort of situation is not all that uncommon. At the beginning of June, a teenage, California-driver fell asleep at the wheel after studying for hours, sending his pickup truck careening through a fence, and crashing alongside a swimming pool. The teenager miraculously evaded death, as one of the fence’s two-by-fours speared the windshield, continued on through the steering wheel, and somehow missed impaling the driver.
“I guess in the rolling motion when the young man rolled off the roadway, it must have tossed him to the side and that board just missed his torso,” said Monica Zech of the City of El Cajon Heartland Fire and Rescue.
Although these incident were unfortunate, things could have been much worse. Jeremy McCracken, a 22-year-old, New Zealand man, died after his car crashed through a fence and down a bank, stopping just meters away from a home. Police did not suspect drugs or alcohol were a contributing factor in the crash.
“I guess anything is possible at the end of the day,” said Jefrey Banks, the son of Grand Rapids-homeowner whose fence bordered the CVS. “You don’t expect anything like this.”