A Utah driver almost lost her life when a piece of debris from the road crashed through her windshield.
Hope McCurdy was on her routine commute on I-15 when a 9-inch by 2-inch heavy piece of metal came soaring through the air, crashing through her windshield.
‘I didn’t see it from the beginning,’ she told local Fox affiliate KSL. ‘But there was a moment when it did come into my vision.’
Footage from the driver’s dash cam shows the metal object fly off of a truck miles ahead of McCurdy’s vehicle and crash directly into her windshield on the driver’s side.
McCurdy said it all happened in a split second, and at one point she thought the object had stabbed her.
‘Flew at me like a ninja star. It popped through and hit me in the chest. I thought I had been impaled. I didn’t know if I was OK for a moment,’ she said.
Despite the gashes on her face and chest, and shards of glass stinging her eyes, McCurdy managed to pull over.
She showed the highway patrol what she now refers to as her ‘survival souvenir,’ which pierced her windshield and landed in her lap.
McCurdy said she is lucky to be alive; had the object hit the car a different way, this would have been a different story.
‘I was lucky because as it spun through the air, it hit my windshield flat. If it had come through like this, I probably wouldn’t be here today,’ she said.
Shaken but determined to prevent similar incidents, McCurdy pleads with drivers to secure their cargo and double-check their vehicles’ undercarriages to prevent such tragedies from happening to others.
‘It’s definitely one of the strangest things that’s ever happened to me and one of the most miraculous things I’ve probably walked away from,’ McCurdy said.
Last year, the Utah Highway Patrol responded to a staggering number of road hazards – over 18,000 calls – of which 420 resulted in crashes,
In a particularly unusual case, a driver reported the base of an office chair flying through their windshield.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that unsecured cargo on passenger vehicles is the cause of most crashes involving debris in the road, taking roughly 730 lives annually.