An accident avoided on December 24. A retiree from Sète interrupts the crazy race of a car that was traveling in the opposite direction on the highway that connects Montauban with Aveyron, reports France 3 Occitania AND Free noon.
The hero of New Year’s Eve: Patrick Thamalet, former employee of the roads of Sète (Hérault) and the Departmental Directorate of Equipment (DDE). He says he saw several messages on traffic signs warning of a vehicle traveling in the wrong direction.
“I had been driving for about 30 or 40 minutes and I did not encounter any emergency services or the police,” he explains to the local press. But finally, after the Toulouse-Nord toll, he noticed that the vehicles in front of him were zigzagging strangely.
“The car stopped a meter away.”
On the straight he saw a car coming towards him, about 300 meters away. He instinctively decided to stop his mad rush:
“I don’t know why I did that. I didn’t loot because I had cars behind me, but I slowed down as much as I could. And the car that was going against the traffic stopped a meter away from me!” he tells Francia 3 Occitania.
The pilot, a crazy driver? No. An elderly couple, “very kind and very sorry,” who had not been able to find a way to return in the other direction, according to Patrick Thamalet. Once the vehicles stopped, he helped the occupants turn around by blocking the other lanes himself.
For Patrick Thamalet, this “crazy” gesture was “instinctive”. But he explains that he keeps in his mind stories of accidents that occurred on the road near his house where, “every year,” deaths are due to vehicles traveling in the wrong direction. “That doesn’t forgive,” he laments.
Source: BFM TV
