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“I always thought, with a big truck like this, if I got hit by a car, it would be no big deal,” Local 221’s Mike Schmidt says. “Wrong.”
Schmidt was on Interstate 90, west of Stewartville, about 10:30 in the morning on Aug. 4. As he has done for the past 13 summers, he was part of a MnDOT crew restriping the lanes. Schmidt was driving a support truck in the left lane, his merge arrows flashing to the right to create a safety zone for the paint truck ahead. Another support truck was on the shoulder a quarter mile behind him, starting the safety zone.
“All of sudden, there was the most horrendous crash and noise,” Schmidt says. “I didn’t know what was happening.”
What was happening was a car rear-ending his truck at 70 miles an hour. The impact spun his truck sideways. Schmidt was wearing a seat belt, but his head still bounced off the window. He ricocheted forward with such force that his knee bent the ignition key at a 90-degree angle.
Schmidt has been with MnDOT for 32 years and has seen a lot. But he’s never experienced anything like this, he says. Fortunately, the yellow crash barrier that extends from the rear of his truck did its job: It absorbed and deflected most of the collision. Pieces of the car’s bumper and fender remained lodged in the barrier’s bellows.
The car itself careened into the ditch. Schmidt could see its air bags deployed, “but to tell you the truth, I was afraid to go back to that car. I didn’t know what I might find.”
Surprisingly, the driver – who told troopers he fell asleep – walked away with little more than serious bruises. The air bags did their job, too.
Five days later, Schmidt is still “a little stiff and achy,” he says. He spent four hours in a hospital getting examined, and additional time getting tested for a concussion. “You could tell I had my bell rung a little bit,” he says.
The most amazing thing about the whole incident, Schmidt says, is how much support he is getting from MnDOT workers across the state. As word spread through Facebook and other MnDOT channels. “I got so many phone calls from other crews wishing me the best,” he says. “It feels good.”
It feels so good, he says, that he’s not going to mind buying pie for the guys in the shop – the ritual price he has to pay for his sudden celebrity.