Have you ever been on the road, driving just a tad bit over the speed limit, blasting your favorite song on the radio and thinking how awesome it is that there’s nothing in your way? Well, that’s happened for me on several occasions, but there was one time that I suddenly had to stop, and I assumed it was just a random back up on the road. After sitting and not moving for nearly an hour, I had to find out what was going on. Luckily, someone in my car was able to look up what was going on and turns out there was a car accident, that was caused by a bunch of fog and smoke. I didn’t think much of it, but after more people in the car starting searching for ways for us to get back on route north to Gainesville, we discovered that both Interstate 75 and 441 had been completely shut down.
I was worried about if I was going to be able to get back on the road, and through news reports on the internet they were revealing how much of the roads were shut down. I knew that there had to more to the story than just a car accident. Initially there were stories saying that early in the morning, there was heavy build up of smoke and fog that lead to several cars and trucks to slow down and other cars started to plow into the stopped vehicles. The first couple of reports described how many people had died and how many were sent to the hospital. There was an overload of information piling up on the phones of my passengers, and it was hard to get exact numbers of everything that had happened.
It seems that anytime something happens, news reporters send out tons and tons of information whether it is thorough and correct or way off of the mark. It is hard to get the information that is necessary to either understand a situation or for it to be useful if it isn’t correct. I felt stuck, and stupid when I was stuck in insane traffic for over an hour, and it is nice to use the internet to find out reports of what is happening, but sometimes I wish that there was a primary source of information rather than tons and tons of secondary reports that are on different wave lengths.