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Garage Door accidents

There are two types of garage door accidents that can occur in your life and hopefully you won’t have to ever experience any of them, but for the sake of knowing a bit about how to deal with the situations should they come up we are going to go through them. This article will cover the first type of accident (the better kind in my opinion) and the other type of accident will be covered later. Garage doors are extremely helpful in our daily life and at this point may even be taken for granted up to a point. However, they can at times be dangerous to us. The first type of accident that you can encounter is you encountering your garage door in your car. By that I mean a crash into your garage door most simply. It is hopefully an accident, but it really can be dangerous to most importantly you and your garage door. 

There are a number of ways it can go down, but when you run into your garage door there are a lot of things going through your mind. You could have simply not waited long enough for the garage door to start opening. You could have not realized that the garage door never opened in the first place. You could even just lose control of your vehicle in your driveway causing you to hit your garage door at hopefully a low speed. Hitting your garage door with your car is sometimes seen as similar to hitting a parked car or something equally embarrassing, but it honestly happens a fair bit and isn’t all that uncommon. The garage door is often one of the first casualties of inexperienced drivers and in many ways is a much better casualty than real people or drivers out on the road. All of that being said however there are some things to know when you are in the situation where you or someone else has hit your garage door.

The first thing you should do if you find yourself impacted into your garage door is to probably turn off the car or back it up from directly touching the garage door anymore. You don’t want to really be doing much while there is the possibility for a garage door to come falling down on top of you (however unlikely that may be). Second you should check to make sure that yo or anyone involved is injured at all. Even though you most likely won’t have been going very quickly the sudden impact or shock could have possibly caused some injury so it is best to have this taken care of before you start focusing on things like a broken garage door or your car. 

Once you have gotten yourself out of a dangerous situation and sought medical attention, if needed, then it is time to deal with the garage, garage door and garage door opener. The first thing that you should do is try and take a look to see if there is any damage. Most garage doors are relatively strong and it is entirely possible that you may in fact have stopped just in time to not doc more than scratch some paint off of your bumper or rub some dirt onto the garage door. If you think that’s the case, and you can’t see any visible marks then you might be able to get away with making sure that your garage door still opens and closes the same way. If this is the case you need to be entirely sure that no damage was done and you may still want to get a garage door professional out to verify, but you might get lucky.

If you were going faster than 2 miles an hour there is a pretty real possibility that you did a little bit of damage. If there is a dent or you notice anything damaged about your garage door or your garage door opener then the best thing to do is nothing. Don’t open it, don't try and fiddle with it, don’t just force the garage door to opener power through. These will all result in a dangerous situation at worst, and more costly repairs being needed at best in most cases. If your garage door or garage door opener aren’t operating at 100% then parts can be broken that otherwise would not need to have been. The few things you do want to do are to make sure people aren’t going in and out of the garage too much and to call a garage door professional. In the best case they will be able to come out in the near future, replace the broken garage door part or parts and you will be back to having a safe garage door in no time at all. Until you get your garage door fixed it is easiest to act like you simply don’t have a garage in order to save yourself from further damaging your garage door opener. The day or two’s inconvenience will be well worth the fact that your garage door will hopefully be relatively intact with little cost to you in no time.

If you aren’t so lucky and you have done some real damage to your garage door and perhaps even the opener you should still follow the advice above but should be ready for a larger bill sadly. If your garage door has been damaged and has also damaged the tracks it sits on or the springs and cables that are used to open it the situation could be dangerous and costly. In this case you will still want to call a garage door professional right away but you then shouldn’t let anybody into your garage or too close to the garage door until it has been checked out by a professional. Lastly you will probably want to get your car looked at in the near future as well. 

Accidents can be scary and expensive, and garage door related accidents are no different. You should first make sure that every one is safe and secondly take the initiative to get your garage door fixed. A damaged garage door can be just as dangerous as the initial accident so most importantly you should try not to use your garage door after it has been damaged.