It Sounded Like a Bomb

The engine, 250 feet from the final resting place of the car.

According to my wife, it sounded like a bomb. 

At 1 am, I slept through it, but she woke me up.  

It was a rather incredible one-car wreck on St. Patrick's Day, and just three houses up.  

It seems a Mercedes Benz, traveling at what I estimate at 100 miles an hour down main street, slammed into a concrete bollard and wooden bench protecting an ornate cast iron fountain.  

The car, it's radiator smashed and tires disassembling, ground through the asphalt of the street, leaving grooves in the road behind it, before hitting a curb, flipping vertically, and taking out three street lights before a wheel hub slammed into a tree, flipping the car again so that it landed, finally, right-side-up in a parking lot with its engine continuing free of the car for another 250 feet.

This morning the car is gone, the engine is gone, and a Caterpillar tractor, several trucks, and a gaggle of city workers were cleaning up the broken brick, smashed concrete, and wood.  Some plastic car bits and a tire, which was missed in last night's clean up, remain to be collected.

The traffic lights will get fixed today -- I think the bollard and bench will take a little longer.

As to the driver, I am told he left alive, but I would not count on that as a continuity.
   

Where a wheel rim smashed sideways into a tree