A motorist walked away from a serious accident caused by their misuse of an emergency vehicle turnaround in Ohio on Monday.
The avoidable accident happened on March 29th in Mayfield Village, Ohio.
In the clip reported on by Fox 8, the motorist can be seen in an emergency vehicle turnaround lane when it suddenly turns the wrong way onto Interstate 271, heading directly into the path of an oncoming semi truck that was merely a few yards away at the time of the motorist’s regrettable decision.
The video shows the rig and car colliding almost immediately, and pieces of the car can be seen scattered across the highway and the big rig’s hood is knocked open. The tractor trailer pushes the car down the highway for a while until they are finally able to come to a full stop.
“I’m driving on 271 north in between Wilson Mills and the 90-split, and there was just a car that went to go turn into the express lanes, going the wrong way and a semi just hit the car,” said a witness to the crash on a call to 911.
The trucker whose dash cam captured the incident, Jason Welsch, says he can’t believe the woman survived the serious wreck.
“We couldn’t believe that we were seeing her walking around to be honest with you,” Welsch said.
“She was back there crying ‘my car, my car.’ Her nose and face were busted up pretty good but other than that, her body was fine. I thought for sure I was going to go back there and find someone dead, but I guess Jesus does save.”
Witnesses speculate that the motorist missed her exit on I-271 and somehow believed she could turn around in the express lanes. As she made the turn, she miraculously missed the 80,000 pound semi truck barreling towards her at highway speeds, and somehow missed that she was turning against traffic rather than going with it.
The woman was transported to a hospital for treatment of her injuries, but an update on his condition is not available.
“The cut throughs are marked for emergency vehicles only and it’s simply not safe to ever use those cut throughs,” said Chief Paul Matias.
“When you have trucks coming at 60, 70 miles an hour, it’s just not a safe thing to do.“
Watch the video of the accident, below.