A Utah driver nearly lost her life when a piece of road debris crashed into her windshield.
Hope McCurdy was on her routine commute on I-15 when a heavy 9-by-2-inch piece of metal flew through the air and crashed into her windshield.
“I didn’t see it from the beginning,” he told the local Fox affiliate. KSL“But there was a moment when I did see it.”
Dashboard camera footage shows the metal object flying out of a truck miles away from McCurdy’s vehicle and crashing directly into the driver’s side windshield.
McCurdy said it all happened in a split second and at one point she thought the object had stabbed her.
Hope McCurdy was on her routine commute on I-15 when a 9-by-2-inch-long piece of metal flew through the air and crashed into her windshield.
Dashboard camera footage shows the metal object flying out of a truck miles away from McCurdy’s vehicle and crashing directly into his driver’s side windshield.
“It flew at me like a ninja star. It went right through me and hit me in the chest. I thought I was impaled. I didn’t know if I was okay for a moment,” he said.
Despite cuts to his face and chest, and shards of glass stinging his eyes, McCurdy managed to stop.
She showed the highway patrol what she now calls her “survival souvenir,” which went through her windshield and landed in her lap.
McCurdy said she is lucky to be alive; if the object had hit the car differently, this would have been a different story.
“I was lucky because when it flew through the air it hit my windshield. If it had happened like that, I probably wouldn’t be here today,” he said.
Shocked but determined to prevent similar incidents, McCurdy is urging drivers to secure their cargo and double-check the underside of their vehicles to prevent similar tragedies from happening to others.
“It’s definitely one of the strangest things that’s ever happened to me and probably one of the most miraculous things I’ve ever come out on top of,” McCurdy said.
Despite cuts to his face and chest, and shards of glass stinging his eyes, McCurdy managed to stop.
Last year, the Utah Highway Patrol responded to a staggering number of road hazards (more than 18,000 calls), of which 420 resulted in accidents.
In one particularly unusual case, a driver reported that the base of an office chair flew through the windshield.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that unsecured cargo in passenger vehicles is the cause of most crashes involving road debris, claiming approximately 730 lives each year.
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