I ran over a ladder last night with my Focus ST

Headed home from jiu jitsu practice last night, full dark. Merritt Parkway south, highway speeds. I'm on the Sikorsky bridge right before my exit in the far right lane when I see a guy stopped on the right shoulder with emergency lights on and the driver is walking along the shoulder. My eyes are drawn to him of course. As I begin to slow a little to go by him my lights pick up a large ladder in the roadway. Even though I can get around the ladder to the right, I can't go right because the guy in the shoulder is blocking me so I end up attempting to swerve to the left and I go right over the ladder.

I stop and assume that the guy on the shoulder lost the ladder and I'm going to lay into him, but when I get over there it turns out he is just a Good Samaritan that went to pull the ladder off the road. Ironic, since if he hadn't been there I might have avoided the ladder.

I drive away listening for issues with the car, but I can't detect anything. I stop at a nearby gas station and start looking under the car and all around, but I can't see any damage at all. I went out today to check and drove it again and there appears to be no damage to the car. The only thing I can think is that I avoided damage because I caught it with the right front tire first instead of head on and because the car has a decent amount of ground clearance.

Good job not hitting anything worse. The Merrit Parkway is a sketchy road and can have some pretty nasty wrecks along it.

If you don't have any cracked rims, tire damage, or underbody damage, treat it the same as if the car landed from a jump too hard - check all the suspension components and if nothing is broken, you got lucky.

Been there, I had a rear skirt bent out but nothing else, was so pissed at the guy who failed to secure his shovel in his trailer, breath deep, check it again and then let it go.

If anything is going to crack, it's not those rims, they are heavy as hell and solid.

I got a little bit of air, but not much. So far no indications of any suspension problems. I guess we'll see when I go autocrossing on Sunday in New Jersey.

Harvey wrote: ...when I get over there it turns out he is just a Good Samaritan that went to pull the ladder off the road. ...

I thought that's what everyone claimed who's picking up a ladder off the street...

Man, lucky escape for you. I have a friend who trashed his Integra about a decade ago hitting a clothes washer that fell off a truck on its way to the dump.

All I've ever had thrown in front of my car are poorly-secured mattresses from people moving house.

My dad plowed into a truck cap that blew off the truck he was following. Driver didn't even stop.

I could easily see you getting out damage-free in this case. Sure it would be lucky but definitely possible.

Hit a table once. Came around a corner and there it was in the middle of the road and there were people running down the side of the road towards it. Smash bang bump bump no more table and there were three people on the side of the road now looking very dejected. No damage to the truck. The table had slid off the back of there trailer as they accelerated away from the corner. Felt bad for them but also was laughing at them. Thankfully it was my old Chevy pick up. Had it been my Porsche I would have been a bit annoyed.

I came around a corner on a '75 CB400F at night. The headlight illuminated what was either a paper bag or a curbing stone in the middle of the road. I was moving pretty good, and I had to calculate. I could try to avoid the bag/rock left or right, but I wasn't 100% sure that I could get around it. If I hit it at an angle, I felt pretty sure I would crash--if it was a rock. Maybe it was a bag? I decided that the smart thing to do was to hit it square in the middle and hope it was a bag.

It was not a bag.

Boom! Thanks, Honda, for the steel front rim. No damage, no crash. Amazing. Still, I would have preferred to hit a bag.

+1 for Jiujitsu.
Almost hit brown before I wrecked my neck and had to stop.
D'arce chokes FTW, happy rolling!

Glad to hear your car seems to have come away unscathed. I hit an aluminum ladder at highway speeds here in Cleveland a few months ago...luckily I was in my hideous Cherokee Trailhawk, and the damage was impressively minimal.

Exhibit A: Exhibit B:

Mattresses are evil. We had a bus catch fire after running one over on the Varazzano Bridge and I had a coworker hospitalized for weeks after one got tangled in the front wheel of another car and pushed him off the side of a highway.

I was following a semi too close in a hurry to return my rental car to Cleveland airport. He straddled the wooden ladder and I tried to swerve and clipped the pass ever tire. Then it went flat so I quickly changed it. Then I saw a dude backing down the median and then he grabbed it and I got his card in case the rental car place jammed me. They let it go as I was late but I know I hit that ladder really hard and it taught me to keep more distance.

Mattresses do weird things.

I hit a 6x6 fencepost dropped in the highway a while back. In heavy traffic, couldn't swerve, hit it with the right front at 65mph dead-on. Didn't blow the tire or the bend the wheel, but it did bend the front strut (so I had about 6* negative camber immediately, which almost made the car go right into the car next to me if I didn't have a good grip on the wheel). Check your camber and alignment just to make sure nothing got bent ;)

I guess they don't make cars like they used to. I ran over a dead frozen deer on the interstate with a Mustang Fox body. I was passing so I couldn't do anything but aim my right front tire at the middle of it. I am sure I was airborne. No damage of any kind. I ran over a flat dear with my SN95. It clipped the cats but no damage.

Years ago when delivering pizza, coming out of a corner on my way back to the store I saw a paper bag on the road. I figured whatever so I just kept driving them boom! There was a big ass rock inside the paper bag. Dented the rim but no air leak.

In reply to pjbgravely:

Hitting dead economy-midsize animals on the highway is probably in the Ford design specification for the Fox body Mustang, right after "SECTION 7.12: HOLD MY BEER AND WATCH THIS QUALITY ASSURANCE PROTOCOL."

ssswitch wrote: In reply to pjbgravely: Hitting dead economy-midsize animals on the highway is probably in the Ford design specification for the Fox body Mustang, right after "SECTION 7.12: HOLD MY BEER AND WATCH THIS QUALITY ASSURANCE PROTOCOL."

Good to know, that is why I hit so many dear with stangs. Good thing they never did a Moose test.

Ford

Flies Over Road Debris

Glad to hear you're OK, I'm very familiar with that stretch of road and it's dangerous in the best of conditions!

This reminds me, I have some very mysterious holes/slashes in the floor pan on my Honda Fit. I've always wondered what was run over/into to cause them.

I saw a guy lose an engine in some commuter carto a ladder on I-75 in A-town morning rush hour years ago. He was right beside me and had nowhere to go. The already mangled ladder stuck one end under the front of the car and wrapped up over the hood. Took out the windshield and judging from the massive, immediate cloud of oil smoke, ripped the oil pan off. It was ugly.

Had a semi hit some kind of huge wooden crate in front of me too. Massive wood explosion, I stood on the throttle and drove under all the airborne pieces before they came back down.

Glad you're ok, maybe you got away clean.

glad to hear both you and the car are alright. could have ended a lot differently.

here is the result of my MR2 trying to catch a 12"x12" piece of plywood that got got swept up by the wind when the car in front of me went over it. I had just enough time to say "what the hell is..." BOOM!

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luckily it hit the windshild flat, otherwise i guarantee that it would have came though.