Tow truck driver Allen Timmerwilke was just doing his job, reportedly trying to get a truck (although, in the video, it appears to be a van) out of a ditch in Columbia, Illinois, last week. How the truck ended up in the ditch isn’t entirely clear, but we’re talking about the Basically Missouri side of Illinois, so we have a few guesses. Regardless, what should have been a routine winch job quickly turned into a scene that looked like it was straight out of an action movie, when a distracted driver drove their van into the back of the tow truck, launching it into the air, First Alert 4 reports.
“He toppled and slid. Narrowly avoiding one car,” Timmerwilke told First Alert 4, but thankfully, no one was seriously hurt. Timmerwilke wasn’t standing in the van’s path when it hit his tow truck, and the driver must have been wearing their seatbelt, because they went to a nearby hospital to get checked out, but no serious injuries were found. The driver of the car they almost hit was probably pretty shaken up by the sight of an airborne van flying toward them, but hopefully, it soon becomes just another funny story for them to tell friends. As long as no one gets hurt too badly, this is definitely a story to share.
Flying van
As you can see in the video above, the crash really does look like something you’d see in a chase scene, with the driver managing to get both passenger-side wheels up onto the truck’s flatbed before launching their van into the air. If only they hadn’t put other people’s lives at risk in the process. “Our guys are out there every day, kind of, putting their lives at risk,” Collin Buresh, a manager at Quality Towing, told First Alert 4.
As the news channel also pointed out, the fatality rate for tow truck drivers is higher than you might think. Nearly 1,300 tow truck drivers are injured on the job every year, and their annual fatality rate is reportedly far higher than average. In fact, back in April, California tow truck driver Christian Leyva died while loading a school bus onto a tow truck, and only a couple of weeks ago, the state of Michigan moved to rename part of M-6 the Keagan Spencer Memorial Highway in honor of a tow truck driver killed by an out of control driver.
Sure, there may be plenty of sketchy tow companies out there that bend or break the law to take more cars, but the folks out there just trying to rescue stranded drivers shouldn’t also have to risk their lives to do so. Which means everyone on the road has an obligation to stay off their phones and pay attention to the road. This incident could very easily have ended differently.
