Tips on avoiding airborne missiles whether roads are frosty, wet or dry

Avoiding unexpected missiles that rain down on us whether the road is cold or not


The horrible nor’easter death of a Hawthorne man last week should be a grim reminder that flying ice and snow aren’t the only airborne missiles that kill and injure motorists and passengers without warning.

Jonathan Rodriguez Melendez's Mini Cooper was struck by a falling tree on Route 15 in Stamford, Connecticut, on Friday. Police believe the 25-year-old driver died almost instantly, but his 30-year-old passenger survived.

For more than two decades this column has emphasized the deadly peril of icy missiles that leave the rooftops and hoods of cars and trucks before smashing into other vehicles — many of them driving in the opposite direction.

These crashes are part of a breathtaking federal estimate that suggests winter slush and ice contribute to some 214,000 American road crashes a year, a figure that works out to nearly 100 per hour from late December to late March.

The solution for ending those crashes is straightforward enough: Don’t drive in snow, and if you must drive, brush or scrape the deadly glop from your car before you get behind the wheel.

But trees?

With apologies to Sylvia Plath, here's an observation we make every time strong winds topple these stately giants: Trees may be pretty, but they're not our friends, especially when a nor’easter blows our way in winter, fall, summer or spring.

Since Feb. 6 1996, when Michael Eastman was killed by flying ice on Route 17, similar events have contributed to tens of thousands of frightening close calls, thousands of crashes and hundreds of injuries in our region, but not one reported death.

At the same time, however, the list of fatalities attributed to oaks, elms, maples and all the other stately species that grace our region would consume a huge list.

An accounting of these ill-fated motorists and pedestrians would include names such as Pawel Podknowicz of Clifton, Julio Cruz of West New York, Jeannie Wang of Parsippany, Lawrence Krause and Ovadia Mussaffi of Teaneck…. The list goes on and on: A busboy walking through Manhattan’s Central Park, a female jogger who died beneath a 30-foot branch in Philadelphia.

Mother-daughter tragedy

Nationally, trees kill some 3,000 people annually, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. For me, though, two names from Sussex County stand out: Kathleen Merando, 42, and her 9-year-old daughter, Kaylyn, of Walpack.

Back in 2004, both were passengers in a sedan that was crushed by a rotting dead oak when it fell on a car in their hometown, seriously injuring the driver — a friend. The oak was one of several huge trees that had been cut back to 20 to 30 feet years earlier to prevent them from interfering with power lines, according to the man who lost his wife and daughter that day.


Two teens narrowly escaped injury when a tree fell across Valley Road in Montclair Friday.

“Trees can’t live when you cut the tops off them,” Anton Merando told me a year after the tragedy.

Merando didn't sue anybody, but he knows what he's talking about because he's much more than a grieving widower. He’s a tree-trimmer by profession.

Back then, a homeowner, town or utility could hire anyone with a harness or a cherry-picker to lift a daredevil with a chainsaw 90 feet in the air.

But in 2010, the Legislature reformed practices that dated back to the 1940s. Companies now are required to employ trained specialists whose certifications must be updated periodically or face fines.

Despite reforms that should make an impact, nor’easters will continue to take a deadly toll across New Jersey’s woodsy suburban terrain.

Saturday, a 44-year-old woman was hospitalized after a tree fell on her and trapped her leg while she was walking her dog. In Parsippany, John Laracca’s automobile was the middle car among three that got trapped on Route 53 when a tree suddenly fell in front of the lead car.

All three vehicles had turned around in retreat when a second big branch fell across their path in the opposite direction and boxed them in.

“I’m not sure what we all would have done if a utility truck hadn’t happened along and pushed the second tree out of the way,” said the Boonton motorist.

Rogue tires

Options are always limited when dealing with the unexpected. For example, what do you do when you see a loose wheel rolling toward you at high speed.

“Nothing much,” said my colleague Dan Sforza, when recounting his experience on the Tappan Zee Bridge several years ago. “Luckily, it just shot past me without crossing into my lane.”

It could have been much worse.

Big tires that fall off trucks or spin off 18-wheelers have a habit of bouncing 10 or 15 or even 20 feet high or more before descending — hard! One of these potential killers left Glenn Corbett breathless a few weeks ago when he saw it falling his way on the crowded Garden State Parkway.

“It glanced off a pickup truck ahead of me, but the driver somehow held the road,” said the Waldwick reader. Glenn's conclusion: “Somebody didn’t maintain his vehicle properly… and it almost killed a bunch of people.”

Back In 2008, a 73-year-old Connecticut driver wasn’t nearly as lucky when a loose tire slammed into the windshield of his Mazda on the parkway in Clifton. Both he and his wife were killed.

In the aftermath of a similar 1998 crash, a jury ordered Daimler Chrysler to pay $20 million to the family of a 38-year-old mother who was killed when a wheel from a Jeep Cherokee crashed into her windshield. The jury ruled that the Jeep’s lug nuts, which bolted the tire in place, weren’t fastened securely. A service garage also had to pay up.

Despite the randomness of these unexpected tragedies, many of them were preventable.

If you change your own tires, it’s not particularly hard to fasten lug nuts, is it? If your trees are growing tall and unstable, doesn't it make sense to hire certified professionals to trim them properly?

And when snow and ice accumulate atop our cars, guess what we all should do?


Don't miss a thing



Read or Share this story: