At about 7:10 p.m. last Friday, a fully loaded cement truck weighing an estimated 66,000 pounds rammed into a parked car on the west side of Palisades Drive just above Michael Lane, propelling it 200 feet down the street towards the center strip. No one was in the car, a black Nissan Altima owned by Highlands resident Rory Ritts. Skid marks indicate that the Mack truck jumped the sidewalk after striking the Nissan from behind, crashed into several trees and broke a main water sprinkler valve on the embankment before veering across the street and turning over on the center strip, its cab crushed. The driver, Vincent Parks, who managed to walk away from the vehicle, was treated at UCLA Medical Center and released early Saturday morning. “My back still hurts,” Parks, 41, told the Palisadian-Post on Tuesday afternoon. “They said I bruised my ribs from the impact. I’m on pain medication.” According to both the LAPD and firemen on the scene, the accident was caused by brake failure. “Apparently the brakes overheated,” said Captain Bill Ernst of Station 23. Parks said that he has been driving trucks for five years, but has been working for Associated Ready Mix for only four months. He said he received basic training on driving a Mack in the first month of his employment and the particular truck he was driving last Friday (a 1989 model) was inspected a week earlier. Doyle Davis, a dispatcher with Associated, said that company trucks are inspected every three months, and that unless they pass, “they don’t go out on the road.” Friday’s near-disaster began earlier when Parks, slowed by traffic on PCH, was 90 minutes late making a scheduled delivery to a Highlands residential construction site. Discovering when he reached the site that his contact had left, he decided to make his way back down Palisades Dr., but not before trying to get in touch with his dispatcher. When his cell phone didn’t work, Parks said he thought briefly of dumping his load, as he was not sure the aging truck would make it back down to Sunset, “given the weight it was carrying.” Parks said his troubles continued when he tried to “pump the brakes.” When he realized that “they were gone” and he continued to pick up speed, he said he thought the safest thing to do would be to crash into a big tree. “It was either that or keep going down the hill head first.” At that point he thought he had “a 50/50 chance of surviving this.” He said he missed the first tree he targeted and slammed into the Nissan instead. From there, he remembers hitting a light pole before heading straight for a tree in the median. He said he didn’t recall the truck rolling on its side or how he got out of the cab. And he has no idea how fast the truck was going before it crashed. “All I know is that the weight of the truck kept pushing me forward,” said Parks, a father of two. “I thought of trying to jump out but realized that was impossible. So I just did what I could to stop the truck.” Rory Ritts, the director of product development for a large mail-order house, has been parking his 2001 Nissan in the same spot for the past two years-across the street from his townhouse at 1646 Palisades Dr., where he lives with his wife Linda and their three children. Ritts, 50, said that he had been home for about 15 minutes on Friday and hadn’t even finished unpacking his car for the long weekend when “I heard this crash. And then another crash. And then silence. I ran downstairs to look outside and noticed my car wasn’t there anymore. Looking down the hill, I spotted what looked like a monster lying on the median and my car was next to it, blocking the road.” Ritts then saw the driver walking around the wreck, and described a scene that “looked like a war zone. There was smoke and the smell of fuel, and cement and water everywhere. I saw some of my personal belongings on the street. There were papers from my briefcase, some samples I was working on, my flashlight, trade magazines and my garage door opener, which was smashed to bits.” Ritts said he lost everything that was in the Nissan in the crash, including his laptop, dry cleaning, prescription eyeglasses, tools, a baby stroller and a Valentine’s gift for his wife. “It was a silver bracelet. The police think it probably disintegrated on impact. It’s a miracle no one was killed. It was lucky Friday the 13th for both of us, I guess.” Parks, nursing his wounds this week, feels the same way. “I’m just so grateful no one else was hurt. I apologize to Mr. Ritts and what I did to his car. I just tried to steer the truck out of the way, as best I could.”
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