Mass destruction

Freak accidents, by their nature, are invariably shocking.  It's not everyday that the front of your house is wrecked along with four other houses.  I had just finished reading to my little daughter The Tale of Jemima Puddleduck and was gazing idly out of my front window when a vehicle whooshed past like a bullet train followed instantaneously (the differential in the speed of light and sound immaterial so close was the distance) by a huge bang and then the scraping of much metal.  I immediately looked out my front door and a liquid nitrogen truck had destroyed my brick boundary wall and steps over an old coal pit gully plus that of the houses further down and totalled three cars.  Seeing the words 'liquid nitrogen' and remembering what it could do from documentaries and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, I ran back inside instantly to call 999 and to get my family away from the danger to the back of the house.  All the emergency services were on the scene in a matter of minutes.  A policeman (using a stepladder) jumped over our garden wall and hammered on our back door, telling us to evacuate - even the garden wasn't safe.  We stood on the field opposite watching with an air ambulance on standby nearby.
What had occurred, I learned today, was that the driver had suffered a medical attack of some kind and, like in the case of the Glasgow bin lorry driver who killed half a dozen people last Christmas, had his foot slumped on the accelerator.  He had shunted the black Mondeo car directly in front of him and careered off the road onto the pavement.  Thankfully, there were no pedestrians because they would have been almost certainly killed, one parked car ending up at a diagonal angle.  The owner of this particular car had only just put her dog leads in it less than a minute before.  For a fairly busy road, it is amazing that there were no cars coming in the opposite direction.  The driver of the Mondeo could walk away from the accident (thought must be subject to recurring random panic attacks); the driver of the truck had to be cut out of his cab and remains in a serious but stable condition in hospital.
I wasn't minded to take pictures while the emergency services were present, feeling it inappropriate while the status of the driver was unclear.  When they fished him out, he was wearing only boxer shorts and socks - reminding of an old Dr Pepper advert, where a nerdish consumer is buried under a deluge of soft drink cans and bottles and the firemen have to remove his clothes to extricate him while news cameras roll.  In this instance, the ambulance crew removed his clothes to see if he had any wounds.
The number of emergency services at the scene recalled the early verses of The 12 Days of Christmas. Four (actually five) police cars, three ambulances (including the helicopter), two fire engines and a liquid nitrogen truck.  After about twenty minutes waiting in the field, I phoned my dad who was in the next house - he hadn't been told to evacuate his undamaged house so I trusted it was fine to return to mine, of course via the garden.  This will be the regular entrance and exit until the stone steps are rendered structurally sound again.  Thinking of all that could have happened, it could have been so much worse - the truck in demolishing my stone steps narrowly avoiding severing my gas pipe and interrupted the supply of houses further down.
The brick boundary wall that used to be in front of my house is an anomaly in a street lined with railings.  There used to be a weaker boundary wall beforehand so my grandmother (who previously owned the property) was within her rights to build a sturdier brick wall.  Given the way the iron railings of the other houses just crumpled at the impact of the truck, had the brick boundary wall been instead railings, the truck would have crashed through my lounge and front door - the wall slowing it down and glancing it away off down the street.  Saving the house is now an additional part of my grandmother's legacy.
My daughter, without a frame of reference for the disaster, was more shocked by the trail of destruction - "so many bricks, everywhere" - but she had been scheduled to go with my mum to the library an hour after the incident.  Had it happened then doesn't bear thinking about.  We are all very lucky there were no fatalities.