A motorist had a narrow escape after he reversed his car through a brick wall on the seventh floor of a multi-storey car park. The 67-year-old driver got his foot stuck between the brake pedal and the accelerator as he tried to reverse into a spot in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His white Mercedes C-class immediately shot backwards, picking up enough speed to smash through the external wall of the Bank of America multi-storey.
Luckily for the un-named driver, the car stopped with its boot poking out into fresh air. The vehicles parked directly beneath were not so lucky as bricks rained down, bashing roofs and smashing windscreens. Stunned passers-by stopped to take pictures on their mobile phones.
Tulsa Police Department Corporal David Crow told radio station KRMG: “At about 1.50pm this afternoon we had a report of a car hitting the side of a building. We didn’t know what that meant but when we got here we saw this Mercedes backed halfway out of a parking spot on the seventh floor of this parking garage. The driver got his foot stuck under the accelerator and couldn’t get it unstuck. He was coming across the back of the parking garage and he created a little bit of momentum because he went quite a distance and hit this wall and almost came all the way out.
Bricks flew up to 80 feet on to a car park below, Cpl Crow added.
“We’re very lucky no-one was walking there,” he said. “The driver is not injured – luckily from all of this all we got was property damage.” An eye-witness told KRMG that he was coming out of a restaurant across the road the moment the Mercedes hit the wall.
The man, who did not give his name said: “I saw the whole thing live – it’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. There was a loud boom and we all looked up and saw the car coming through the wall.”
One woman, Mary Barnes, said the roof and windows of her 2008 Toyota Corolla had been smashed by the falling debris. “It still felt new to me,” she said of her car. Officials were able to drive the Mercedes back into the car park, as the back wheels were not completely outside the building. A sheet of plywood was covering the hole in the building last night.
Daily Mail
Vocabulary
narrow – keskeny
multi-storey – sokemeletes
to poke out – kiáll, kiugrik
to unstuck – kihúz, kiszabadít
corporal – tizedes
debris – (kő)törmelék
plywood – lemezelt fatábla
