Man's arm saved by iPad in garbage truck crash
Date May 2, 2013 - 4:00AM
Simon White
His work car faces a decent stint in a panel beater's workshop but Neville Toms emerged pretty much unscathed from his ordeal.
The iPad is renowned as a multipurpose tool but Phillip Island building supervisor Neville Toms might have found an alternate use for it that would have Steve Jobs smiling from beyond the grave.
Toms was driving a dual-cab ute through the Victorian island's main street on Monday morning when he swerved to avoid a garbage truck.
The truck clipped the left-hand side of Toms' vehicle, which was then flipped and skidded on its driver's side for an estimated 70 or 80 metres.
The driver's side window was completely smashed and the wing mirror shorn off.
But when Toms regained his senses he quickly noticed a couple of unusual things.
The first was that he had only a couple of minor cuts to his right-hand shoulder, caused he suspects by broken glass.
The second was that his iPad, the cover of which was now heavily scratched, was lying on the road exactly where he might otherwise have expected his shoulder to be.
"I'd be bullshitting if I said I knew for absolute sure that the iPad got caught under my shoulder," Toms said.
"But it's the only thing I can think of. I had to climb out of the passenger side of the car and then I realised the engine was still running and because there was some oil on the road, I thought I'd better turn it off.
"I climbed back in to do it and that's when I saw the iPad there where my shoulder would have been.
"You can get some pretty decent road rash if you fall off a bike going at five or 10km/h. So you'd think if a similar thing happened in a car doing 70km/h it would normally have to do some pretty serious damage.
"Instead I've only got a couple of cuts which you could pretty much wash away in the shower."
The iPad was encased in a strong plastic red cover, which now, as the accompanying photograph attests, has clearly seen better days.
Bizarrely, however, the iPad, itself hasn't. Toms says it is working perfectly and he used it immediately after the crash to take photos of the overturned vehicle, which belongs to his employer Coldon Homes.
"I was surprised it was still working. I expected it to be broken for sure," Toms said.
"The guys from the fire brigade who where there told me to count my blessings too. That kind of crash normally causes more serious injuries."
Oh, and in case you were worried about where the iPad might have been at the start of the crash, Toms is keen to assure readers it was lying on the passenger seat.
Given the flooormat on the driver's side ended up perched on the windscreen, that doesn't seem like such a tough proposition to accept.
