It seems a fairly safe bet you may never have had one, but I was reading an incident online today that indicates many people may be under-prepared, or maybe totally unprepared, for a blowout.
The victim in this case was on his way home from a three-day fishing trip. He was about an hour from home when the driver-side trailer tire blew. It didn't take but a cursory check to learn that he had the very bare minimum on hand to change the tire.
First, his 4-way lug wrench barely got the spare off its bracket, simply because it wasn't made for that. His bottle jack, while compact, was undersized and, on top of that, leaked fluid. As a result, he had to use his truck jack, which was missing the crank. Accordingly, he had to improvise with a pair of fishing pliers. Get the picture?
Further, the spare was weather-cracked and looked terrible. Fortunately, though, it took some more air. This was one of those things the victim had been telling himself needed to be replaced, but it "looked fine" on the side of the trailer, so he had just dismissed the idea...until he had to creep all the way home at only 45 mph.
Last but not least, he felt very exposed while changing the tire on a four-lane highway, where cars were zooming by at 65 mph. With the blown tire on the driver side, he felt "over exposed." All he could use was his four-way flashers. He didn't have any road flares, highway cones, or reflectors that he could put up a few hundred feet behind him.
While not completely sure what had caused the blowout, the victim had an idea. When he had started the trip home, he noticed the blowout tire was a little low and figured to get some air along the way. After two hours on the road, though, he was having second thoughts. Besides, he had remembered that the air gauge in his truck only went to 50 lbs. The funny, or more precisely, the not-so-funny thing about that was that his truck tires held 85 lbs., which made the gauge totally useless...for his truck or trailer either one.
That being the case, the victim finally stopped and added air to the low tire until it "looked good," then continued down the road at speeds reaching 72 or 73 mph.
In retrospect, the victim explained that both tires on his trailer were only a couple months old at the time of the blowout.
"I honestly thought that since those tires were new, they would be fine," he said, "but all it took was a single instance of neglect. We can overlook some things for years and never have a problem...or overlook it just once and have issues. Fortunately, it was only a tire, and no one or nothing was injured or damaged."
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