Level: Intermediate Kieran McGovern
Modern wheelchairs are pretty fast. Most can travel comfortably at 5mph. Some can go above 10mph. But how did Ben Carpenter get an ordinary wheelchair to travel at 50 mph?
Not expecting
a wheelchair
It happened like this.
Twenty-one year old Ben from Paw Paw, Michigan, USA
has muscular
dystrophy. To get around his local
town he uses a wheelchair.
One day last July, Ben was crossing a road at a junction.
At the same time, a giant lorry was pulling out of a
gas station.
The driver didn’t see Ben. His driver’s
cab was very high up. Ben, of
course, was very low down on the road. And the driver
was not expecting to see a wheelchair.
Lorry Drives
Away - With Wheelchair!
The lorry continued to pull out into the road. A moment
later it bumped into the back of Ben’s wheelchair.
The chair tipped forward. Somehow, the handles became stuck
in the lorry’s radiator grill.
Still the driver did not notice. He only saw clear road
ahead and put his foot down on the accelerator. The lorry pulled away
– with Ben, in his wheelchair, stuck to the front.
The lorry continued down the highway. Soon it reached a speed of
50 MPH. But the driver still knew nothing about the man
in the wheelchair. ‘I thought, ‘When is he
going to stop?’ said Mr Carpenter. ‘The next
town was 70 miles away.’
Meanwhile, cars travelling in the opposite direction could
see Mr Carpenter in his wheelchair. Many thought they were
dreaming. Others phoned the police.
Police don't
believe it
At first the police thought it was a joke. But the calls
about the wheelchair kept coming.
‘A truck just came by with a gentleman in a
wheelchair on the front,’ a woman told the emergency
operator. ‘He’s pushing him down the
road.’
Luckily, a police car was travelling down the same highway
in the opposite direction. The police car did a U-turn and
managed to get the lorry to stop.
Spilled
Drink
The driver climbed down from his cab. When he saw the Mr
Carpenter he nearly fainted. Surprisingly, his young
‘passenger’ was quite relaxed. ‘Mr
Carpenter spilled his can of cola,’ said the police
officer. ‘And he lost his hat. But he wasn’t
upset.’
And the wheelchair? It needed new tyres but was back on the
road in a week.
“It was very scary,’ said Mr Carpenter,
later. ‘I tried to call for help but nobody could
hear me.’
