Two Wishes Remaining

Removing Mercedes from Verdugo Wash won't be easy

wilwheaton:

A 53-year-old woman, whose name was not immediately released, apparently mistook the concrete-lined Verdugo Wash for a freeway onramp. She whizzed down the channel for at least a mile, reaching speeds of up to 70 mph. She finally stopped after barreling down several 3-foot-long steps and after being hailed down by maintenance workers.

Seriously? If you can drive more than a few feet down a flood control channel and not realize that you’re not, you know, on the freeway, you probably shouldn’t be driving ever again.

Rather that leaping immediately to ageism, ableism, and sexism like a lot of folks, I wondered how the hell she got in the channel in the first place.

Where she probably entered, based on news coverage and a little Google Maps surveying (east of this, there’s no access points because the duct itself starts a short distance to the east.) There is a connecting access easement that comes off the road here (that also looks like part of it is someone’s driveway). For whatever reason, she likely went down this easement, through what I hope would be a fence (which may have been open, owing to the aforementioned maintenance workers), and turned right. You can follow her progress to the West, and then see the steps she went down (and the big dropoff ahead) at San Fernando.

Realistically, though there’s no lane markers, and possibly a river running through the center of it, it looks very similar to a freeway viaduct, and if you get distracted at a key moment, are looking for something in an unfamiliar area, or have a real bad GPS, it’s totally feasible to end up in it, especially if the workers left the gate open.

Say what you want about the poor woman’s intelligence, age, or gender, but it shouldn’t have been that easy to do. And if she was tearing down it at 70 mph, she wasn’t actually in there very long - couple of minutes maybe - before she hit the drops.