Twists of fate that spared these people from Hoboken train crash

We spent a good part of Thursday's show discussing the NJ Transit train wreck in Hoboken. Governor Christie was on air with us in the five o'clock hour with updates and he agreed with me that looking at the debris it was hard to believe the death toll wasn't higher. Blood everywhere, people pinned in wreckage, a horrifying day all around.

When something big like this happens I often think about those simple twists of fate that can work one way or the other. A small change in plans that can either spare a person or doom a person. As the morning went on, I found out three of them. When our sitter arrived at our house to watch the baby while I went to work, she told me her cousin is normally on that very train every day. Not just a train on that Pascack Valley line, but that very train. The only reason her cousin wasn't that day was they needed their car for something after work so they drove instead. If it weren't for whatever thing was happening after work who knows what could have happened?

Then I found out my wife's uncle is always on that very train. He works in Manhattan and switches in Hoboken to a PATH train. Yesterday he came down with a bad cold and decided at the last minute not to go in. It haunts me to think what might have been.

Then there's our own boss who knew someone who is always on #1614 to Hoboken. Something came up that threw off his own schedule and made him skip the train Thursday morning. All these folks would have been in the thick of it.

We took calls on this yesterday with people sharing their own twist of fate stories. One woman called in who's daughter was supposed to be on the flight out of Boston that was hijacked and flew into the World Trade Center on September 11th. A last minute change spared her. Stories like that were endless and chilling. Sadly, these twists of fate aren't always the ones with happy endings. Take the story of the poor guy from Hamilton Tuesday night. He was taking out the trash at the same time a driver lost control of their SUV and left the roadway, came up onto this man's property striking and killing him before crashing into the porch. Thirty seconds one way or the other and he would have been fine. I imagine some small seemingly meaningless decision that changed everything for him, like stopping to watch a commercial he finds funny on TV before continuing to the kitchen for the garbage. As a caller said Thursday, you can't live your life by what ifs. But that invisible roulette wheel in the sky certainly has our number on it.

-Jeff Deminski

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