On the evening of November 7, 2005, Dr. Zehra Attari became disoriented on her way to a conference in Alameda and drove her car into the estuary. It took authorities nearly seven weeks to find her body. Her family was horrified to learn that the street she was driving on that dark and rainy night went straight into the water, with almost no warning. ... Attari was driving on Grand Street when she died, and at the time, it clearly was a dangerous road. In fact, almost exactly three years before Attari died, two men drowned after their car plunged into the estuary in the very same spot. But city officials ignored the obvious safety hazard at the time because police had blamed the earlier accident on drunken driving after they found alcohol bottles in the backseat of the two men's car. There was never any such evidence found in Attari's car. She was a respected doctor who lived in San Jose and ran a practice that treated low-income children in Oakland's Fruitvale District. The night she died, she left her International Boulevard office on her way to a conference on Alameda's Bay Farm Island. Her family later said she had a poor sense of direction and an Alameda resident subsequently told police that she thought she saw Attari just before her death in a Trader Joe's parking lot in the western end of the city. The resident reportedly said that Attari looked lost and distraught.Attari likely made several wrong turns and ended up on Grand Street heading back toward Oakland. In the rain and darkness, she likely didn't see the lone yellow sign on her left that read "End," or the single flashing red overhead light a few dozen yards before the water. At the time, those were the only warnings that the road was about to turn seamlessly into a boat ramp that plunges straight into the murky water.
After Attari's death, city officials repeatedly denied anything was wrong with Grand Street. But then a short time later, city officials made a telling admission of guilt. They installed temporary barricades to stop motorists from meeting the same fate as Attari. Grand Street suddenly started to resemble other boat ramps in the city and elsewhere in which motorists have to make a sharp turn off a regular street or go through a gate before they arrive at the water's edge. The barricades remain to this day.
I had to look that up on Google Maps.
Grand Street is on the eastern side of Alameda (the City of Alameda is an island city on the east side of San Francisco Bay, adjacent to Oakland). Grand Street cuts across the island west to east, from bayside at Shoreline Drive to the estuary side at Clement Avenue.
The boat ramp is still as described in the story, according to the map. There are no gates or barriers to the ramp.
Good grief! Of all the ways to die, I don’t want it to be from stupidity...mine or others.
Btw, I read online that she and her husband were organic farmers. I personally don’t have anything against them and even recently started juicing with organic vegetables (body sure does love it when you give it what it was made to have!!!) but I would count them as highly likely Obama voters....or as the Duck Dynasty Dad calls em...yuppies. Yuppie pretend wanna be farmers....just my own personal opinion.
Maybe because I have had such severe and crippling anxiety all my life it makes me hype-aware and hypervigilant to the point no person would ever be. Rarely have I gone blithely thru life oblivious to danger and to His credit, the good Lord, who has saved my bacon many times over the years...why I am still not sure.