Incident 09

Ladies stuck at firework night display

Map of field

Key

Brown boxes - Indicates muddy area's - Letters are reference points in the story and photos

Blue boxes - Letters are view points from where photos were later taken

Please note - photos were taken the following morning by which time all the barrier tape marking off the car park lanes and viewing area had been removed and the site had dried out quite a lot due to overnight wind (and no further rain).

Details

For a number of years I have attended a large fireworks party on 5^th November, our Bonfire or Firework night here in the UK. It’s organized by a local charity and takes place in a large field at the back of an old pub. The pub is on the corner of two roads and the field extends round the back from one road to the other. They mark out two car parks. The smaller one has an entrance and exit off of the more minor road on the side of the pub, and a larger one with a joint entry/exit off of the major road. There is also a gate right next to the pub, leading off of the main road, that is used just by the traders.

Photo A02 - Vantage Point A - exit from smaller car park

On many previous occasions the field has been pretty wet, being as the event is held in one of our wettest months. However this year the good old British weather did its best! It rained on and off for about a week before, and then did so really heavily for the two days leading up to the event. It also managed to pour down during most of the event as well.

About two thousand people plus attend and as it is in the middle of a wood and miles from anywhere, everyone has to drive there. A few hundred vehicles manage to park along side both the main and minor roads, but by far the majority use the two cars parks.

The area off of the minor road is pretty flat and as they use two entrances, it is usually not too bad in terms of getting muddy.

However, the much larger main car park off of the major road only has one public entrance. It also slopes gently away from the road down towards the firework display area. Every vehicle leaving therefore has to drive up a very slight slope and out though an entrance that everyone has already used to get into the site. This can make it pretty muddy, but the organizers know this, and so they place a few sheets of track-way immediately inside the field entrance. However, the track-way only covers a tiny area between the hardcore in the actual gateway and the start of the field. It actually a pretty pathetic attempt! (luckily).

Photo B2 - Lorry parked in main entrance (see later story for details)

There is slightly more of a slope out from the trader’s car park up to their gateway by the pub. Most of the traders use vans (often with trailers), or small lorries, and so when wet this slope soon gets really muddy. Also, if it rains during the event, the boots of hundreds of visitors turns large areas of the traders filed into a muddy mess, which some of the traders at the bottom end then have to drive across to get out. When this happens, the normal procedure is to divert some of the traders along the fairly level section of field to join with the public traffic leaving through the main exit. The traders problem with that is that a) some of them they still have to drive up across the muddy section made by the public, b) the main gateway is often still busy (and so they can not get a run at the muddiest section just inside the gate) and c) they have to make a sharp left turn to get out of the exit gate, just when they reach the muddiest part!

See above map for details.

Photo C04 - view from Traders Gate towards muddy patch C with part of patch D on the right (main gate behind tree on left)

Photo D01 - Muddy patch D in foreground (with patch F behind and stretching down the side of the building)

On this particular night I was fortunate in that I was able to attend the event on my own and therefore could stay as late as I wanted to. Lots of people hang around at the end to carry on drinking and using the amusements. This allows all the cars containing families with young kids to leave as soon as the fireworks have finished.

My experience form previous years is that 95% of the cars leaving straight after the event are driven by men, with women in the front and their kids in the back. However there is then a lull in departures until getting towards closing time. The car parks then get really busy again, but this time there always seems to be plenty of women driving. I am not sure how the men manage to bribe the women to drive and let them do all the drinking?

During the departure of the families, I had a walk around and tried to identify some likely spots for possible stuck incidents later on. A few men managed to get stuck in three or four places within the car park, but in the main I was pretty disappointed that the grass withstood the rain quite so well. Most cars span their wheels on the really muddy part close to the main gate, put nearly all managed to keep on going, sometimes with the help of car park stewards.

I was even wondering if it was worth waiting for the later departures, but then after about half an hour, it started to rain again, this time really heavily, so I decided to wait.

The rain caused some people to start to leave when perhaps they might not have had it remained dry. There were still lots of cars in the main car park, but not so many in the smaller one. I decided to have a wander round in the main car park, as I mentioned, I had already identified a few places where mud had started to gather, mostly in locations where the field dipped down and the water had remained with nowhere to drain away.

I had also spent some of the time looking around for rear wheeled cars. I had found three BMW’s, an old Volvo Estate and a Mazda MX5 sports car.

It was difficult trying to keep an eye on all of them as they were pretty spread out. There was also the problem that I did not want to sit and wait for the drivers of just these cars, in case they were all men, and in the meantime I might have missed a lady who was stuck.

I decided that a better option was to stand and try and watch people leaving the traders area and making their way to their vehicles.

I started to make my way towards the trader’s area when I saw a lady and man heading towards the car park. She was carrying what looked like car keys. She was aged about 30, with brown curly hair and was with a man who was slightly older. She was very slim but only about 5’6” tall, and was wearing quite tight dark coloured jeans and a waterproof raincoat with padding. I turned and watched as they walked to the bottom middle section of the car park, and up to a grey coloured Ford Focus that was parked between the muddy area (H) and the fence into the viewing area.

Photo H02 - Muddy area H (from the side) where the Focus was stuck (about where the barrier is lying down)

Photo 01 - Area H from in front - Focus was a little to the right of this trying to head away from the fence in the background

(There had been barrier tape right across the bottom of the car park where the blue bins are located, and also tape between each wooden post making parking lanes - shown as dotted lines on map)

The car was facing the tape dividing the various parking lanes and I watched as they got in and she slowly reversed out into the centre of the lane. She was only about 50 feet from the dip that contained the mud (H) and my heart was racing hoping that she would only approach it slowly. If she went towards it with just about any speed, it was very likely that her momentum would get across without her getting stuck.

She started to pull forwards and headed towards the dip. She seemed to be going too fast and I was getting concerned, when she must have suddenly seen the muddy patch in front of her. Instead of accelerating to try and get through it at speed, she suddenly braked. I could not believe my luck. She actually stopped just short of it. I could imagine the conversation between her and the man about whether she should try and drive through it. The problem she had was that there was no other way out at that time, as the barrier tape was still across between the car park and the viewing area. The muddy dip stretched right across her exit and so she had no choice. I would imagine that he told her that, because she then started to move forwards again. However, he obviously did not tell her to accelerate hard because she pull away at a crawl, and then carried on at a slow speed, obviously still in first gear.

Her front wheels started to go down into the dip and amazingly then did not immediately start to spin. However, as soon as they started to slowly climb out the other side her nearside wheel started to spin. The car crawled forwards a few feet but then the back wheels entered the muddy area and the extra resistance became too much. The car stopped moving forwards and she just sat there with her front nearside wheel slowly spinning round and round. After about 10 seconds she tried turning her steering wheel first to the left and then to the right, but of course it made no difference. In fact all it did was to make a slightly bigger rut!

After about another 20 seconds, she gave up and then sat there doing nothing. Oh to have been a fly on the wall in that car! I could imagine her saying: “There, now I’m stuck. I told you I did not want to drive into this dip. What do I do now?” or something similar!

He must have told her to try reverse, but again he obviously did not tell her to ‘gun’ it in an attempt to get up a bit of speed whilst the front wheels went down the slight slope, to enable her to get back up out of the dip. It was so obvious that speed was what was going to give her the best chance of getting back onto the grass. She should have then reversed right back a long way and then headed for the dip at high speed. Fortunately for me she did not have a clue and so she selected reverse and then very very slowly let up the clutch. The reversing lights were on for at least 10 seconds with the engine revs slowly building up, before her wheel finally had enough power to start to turn. Of course with such a gentle acceleration it immediately began to spin. She obviously did not realize that her back wheels were also in the mud and were in fact trying to go back up a slight slope. If she had been deliberately trying to get herself more stuck, she could not have made a better job of it!

She then sat there with her wheel spinning and very gradually accelerated a little more. Of course all that happened was that the wheel spinning got faster, the car not moving at all.

I gradually walked over towards the car and headed around towards the back of it, as she selected first again, but this time she did give it slightly more revs. The problem was that she had by now dug her front wheel into a nice little rut. I got round to the drivers side and started to walk towards her door. I wanted to see if her offside wheel was spinning as well. As I got nearer she stopped trying forwards and suddenly almost slammed it into reverse and accelerated quite a bit more. It seemed like she had finally worked out what she was doing wrong, but she had left it too late. She was still spinning her wheel as I got to her door and opened it. She looked really surprised as I leant forward and said: “Do you need a push?”

She said: “Oh yes please, I seem to be stuck. Its all his fault, he told me to drive through it”

I then caught hold of the front door pillar and said: “Are you going to try forwards again?”

She said: "Yes okay, if you think that is best”

I said: "Well you were not getting anywhere as I got to you when you were trying reverse, so you might as well try forwards”

Amazingly her man still sat there and said nothing, and did not even bother to get out to help push. I wondered for a second if he was ‘one of us’, in which case he would not have been happy about me offering to help!

As I was thinking this she said: "Sorry about him not helping, but he has only had his plaster off from a broken ankle yesterday, and I wont let him push the car in case he goes over on it. Shall I go straight or turn to the side?”

I replied: “You could try steering over to your left, it does not look quite so muddy on that side”

This was not exactly the truth, but I did not think she would have been able to see that from in the drivers seat!

She turned the steering wheel quite a way to the left, which was obviously totally the wrong thing to do, and then started to let up the clutch.

The interior light was on because her drivers’ door was open and so I had the chance to look at her legs as she lifted up the clutch and pressed the accelerator. Her jeans were quite tight, but stupidly I did not bother to look to see what she was wearing on her feet!

Her wheels started to spin and she again did not move, even with my considerable effort to push her (well more like considerable effort to ‘appear’ like I was pushing her!). I had to try and make it ‘look good’ in case her man suspected I was not really helping.

After about 20 seconds of constant spinning, I said to her: “Try dipping the clutch and letting it up again, but do it repeatedly”

She started off pressing the clutch down quite slowly and then also slowly letting it up again. After four or five goes at this, I suggested that she needed to really speed up the movement, and to do the same with the accelerator. She started off doing as I had asked, but did not quite get the hang of it, however, after a few more attempts and some words of encouragement from me, she gradually got the idea. Of course it made no difference as she was now in a nice rut, whilst trying to drive up a slight slope, whilst her wheels were turned sharply to the left!

After a nice show of her left leg moving up and down on the clutch, I suggested that she quickly change into reverse and carry on doing the same thing, but more quickly and with even more revs.

She did exactly as I asked and as she did so she said: "I really hope this works”. She appeared to now be starting to get worried that she was not going to be able to get out this dip, because as soon as her wheels started to spin in reverse she said: "Come on please get me out of here”.

She continued to press the accelerator and clutch pedals up and down alternatively, in a desperate attempt to reverse out. Her wheels were continuing to spin round and round in the muddy rut and still she did not move one inch.

I was looking down at her legs when out of nowhere three blokes came across the front of the car from her nearside. I had not seen them approaching, or else I would have got her to quickly stop, in the hope that they would have ignored her.

However, they had obviously seen her spinning and so all three suddenly started pushing on her bonnet, all in a line. Unfortunately, I think they may have been rugby players as they were all big guys and with all of them pushing quite hard, and her revving quite hard, the car suddenly started to move slowly backwards. She carried on dipping and raising the clutch and once the car started to move i.e. her front wheel was out of the rut, in went backwards quite easily. She was soon out of the dip and so she stopped a little way back. One of the guys came round to me and said: "Tell her to go back further and then drive like mad to get through it. We will wait and give her a push if she needs it”

She obviously heard what he said, as she replied: “Oh thank you”.

She then closed her door and reversed back almost as far as the barrier tape. She then drove forwards at a much greater speed and managed to drive straight through the muddy dip without hardly spinning a wheel. The guys cheered at her as she went past and I think she shouted something out of her window, but I did not hear what.

I tried to casually watch as she carried on up the field at quite a speed and she was lucky that there was nothing approaching the exit gate as she did, and so her speed appeared to take her across the mud and onto the metal track-way without any further problems. She may have been spinning her wheels over the really muddy bit approaching the track-way, but I could not hear, and I certainly could not go running after her whilst the group of lads was stood watching!

Photo L05 - Muddy patch L straight ahead - Muddy Patch K just showing next to rear of lorry

(The Ford Focus drove straight up through middle of photo and onto metal track-way just behind lorry)

Once she was out of the field, I turned and started to look for my next victim!