Album: Bus

     Album:2013:08-20 Burning Man:Bus

Driving up I80 my biggest bus nightmare comes true and one of the front tires explodes. The bus violently lunges forward and starts careening towards the edge of the highway at 80 MPH.

Evidently the 'right thing to do' in such situations is to initially accelerate to try to lift up the front end and regain control. I had done much research on this particular situation because of how much it has always worried me, due to the understanding of the power of inertia when riding an 18-ton object. Turns out that it didn't help, possibly because my bus isn't powerful enough for this to make a difference. So the careening continued. Fortunately I was in the far left lane to begin with, nobody was to the right of us, and this was on one of the huge straightaways of I80, as opposed to the two-lane mountains we would be hitting in a couple hours, where we would most likely have died.

I was fairly sure we were going off-road, but I kept fighting it and when we got down to ~40 MPH and had made it all the way across the lanes I was able to regain control, and we skidded to a stop on the shoulder, leaving a long groove in the highway from my rim.

Exciting!

The destroyed wheel,
and the gouge in the highway ( comments)
The gouge goes back
~1/8th mile ( comments)
Our emergency roadside savior
( comments)
After pulling off the road
( comments)
The ex-tire
( comments)
The ex-wheel
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Airing up the replacement tag wheel
( comments)
Powered by album tool a MarginalHack by David Madison on Fri Nov 11 21:17:12 2022