Some hands-on experience found a premed student in Michigan just recently when the young man saw a car crash during a routine trip. Riding in a car with two of his friends, Minan Mansour immediately stopped the car and got out to help in case anyone was seriously hurt. This was what led to Mansour’s discovery of the man he had to help out of his own car by breaking the auto glass on the stranger’s vehicle and pulling the man through it.
According to Mansour, the man he dragged through the hole he smashed into the windshield auto glass was in the vehicle that had rolled over. The person in the other vehicle involved in the crash seemed to have been fine, so the premed student immediately shifted his attentions to the driver of the car that had been flipped upside down. Upon investigation, Mansour and his friends realised that the man was practically unconscious and still in the driver’s seat.
Mansour’s concern for the man’s safety—which was what drove him to do some fast thinking and extricate the man from the vehicle—was due to the surroundings of the crash. The accident had damaged a nearby power and telephone pole, with the result that there were sparks flying about the overturned vehicle. Mansour also claimed that there were even sparks flying from the vehicle itself, which more than frightened him as he worried over how to preserve the man’s life.
In situations of rollover, the biggest concern is usually to extricate the person in the overturned automobile before the stress of the reversed weight distribution finally wins out over the safety structure of the vehicle’s roof. Vehicles are typically designed such that there is still sufficient structural power in the roof of the car, augmented by the windshield’s auto glass, to hold up the body of the car and prevent it from collapsing inwards and upon any remaining passengers during a rollover incident. However, if a the windshield pops out or is shattered beyond repair, this support frame usually fails far more quickly, with the people inside being in danger of being crushed in what shall essentially be a metal sandwich.
Fortunately for the man in the accident, whose name has yet to be released to the media, Mansour was a quick thinker and got him out before any problems of that sort could transpire. The young man simply broke one of the side windows of the vehicle and got the man out through the hole left by the auto glass, even using his studies to help him give the man a quick check before the paramedics arrived. Later, upon being interviewed by the press, Mansour said that he found the experience of helping someone in such a critical situation “amazing”.
