Johnson Readers are right If gas pedal jams, turn off the key

Johnson Readers are right If gas pedal jams, turn off the key

I am such a knucklehead. It is a point more people than I can rightly count have called or e-mailed to remind me of in recent days.

The reason for these reminders of my knuckleheadedness is a little ditty I wrote about a south Denver woman who found herself flying at 80 mph down West Yale Avenue after the floor mat of her 2001 Nissan Maxima grabbed and trapped her car's accelerator.

Mostly, I used Diane Godfrey's experience as a safety reminder in the wake of the news that Toyota is recalling 4.2 million cars to fix what federal safety regulators call a "very dangerous problem" with the amount of clearance between the gas pedals and rubber floor mats.

A floor mat also is a suspected cause of an Aug. 28 high- speed crash that took the lives of a California Highway Patrol officer and three members of his family. The tragedy sparked the Toyota and Lexus recall.

I have been overrun with pleas since the column ran that I do another public service and tell folks who find themselves in a similar situation to, and I quote, "TURN OFF THE KEY!"

The advice arrived in wildly divergent ways, but shutting off the ignition was the point. And I must confess I never once even thought to ask Godfrey whether she had considered such a thing.

I know nothing of cars. So I asked the one guy I trust with my own vehicles. Plus, I wanted to see whether my readers are as smart as they insist, if simply shutting off the ignition would have worked.

"In that situation, you turn the key off, you are going to lose your power steering and brakes but, yeah, that would solve the problem," said Bryan Clark, a supervisor at Louisville Tire & Auto Care.

If it happened to him, his first choice would be to put it in neutral before shutting off the ignition, he said. "You'll just coast to a stop."

If you shut down the car while in drive, as almost everyone who called me suggested, "you are going to stop a lot quicker than you want, and probably crunch up and ruin a lot of things in the transmission, but you will definitely stop," Clark said.

The point remains the same: Check and check again your floor mats.

Water leak fixed, but bill is not.

It is time to check in on Kelley Brooks, she of the $7,000-plus Denver Water bill.

Regular readers will remember the tale of the 900,000-gallon water leak last summer that gave no hint of its existence — until the water company's bill arrived in the 40-year-old woman's mailbox.

When we last left Brooks, she had hired a plumber to figure out the source of the massive leak, which by all things mathematical should have turned her home at 23rd Avenue and York Street into lakeside property.

Once she and Denver Water agreed the leak had been fixed, the company, she said, offered her a "leak adjustment," knocking what Brooks owed to $3,500 payable, well, yesterday.

She pleaded, twisted and shouted some more. Today, the bill has been reduced further to $2,157.48. Payment is due.

"I don't have that kind of money," Brooks said. Asked what she planned to do, she gulped, shook her head and studied the bill one more time.

"I don't know what I'm going to do," she finally said.

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