Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Lucky escape as car falls from flyover on to path
A man and woman have miraculously escaped with just minor injuries after their car plunged 20ft from a flyover and landed on its roof on a cycle path below.
The Mercedes hatchback lay wrecked on the Great Stour Way after crashing through barriers from the A2 near Wincheap around noon on Monday.
Emergency crews were quickly on the scene but remarkably the driver – a man in his 50s from Romford, east London – had already managed to climb out of the wreckage.
But a woman in the car was trapped and had to be freed by firefighters. She suffered head, arm and leg injuries and was flown by air ambulance to the William Harvey Hospital at Ashford.
The man was taken to hospital by land ambulance, but police later said they had both only suffered minor injuries.
Fortunately, nobody on the well used cycle and footpath, which links Canterbury to Chartham, was in the way of the falling vehicle. But witnesses said it was extraordinary the car’s occupants survived.
Sean Vincent, 25, was returning from Morrisons to his home in Merchants Way when he heard a huge bang.
He said: “I thought something had come off the back of a lorry and then I saw smoke and just ran straight over to see if anyone was hurt.
“It was shocking, there was petrol around the car and the engine had come out.
“There was just me and a jogger at the scene. The driver got out of the car and there was a woman in the passenger seat who was trapped.
“The emergency services arrived within five minutes.”
Walker Derek Robertson, 70, came across the scene as he used the footpath through the marshes. He said: “It looked really nasty, and for those people to survive is very lucky indeed.”
The carriageway over the footpath was closed for a recovery crane to lift the wrecked Mercedes back on to the road. It remained closed for most of the day while workmen repaired the damaged crash barriers.