A driver in Wisconsin has spoken of surviving a terrifying 70ft plunge from a snow-covered bridge, with his pickup truck’s fall and landing captured on a dramatic video.
Richard Lee Oliver said he was driving to his mother’s house in Milwaukee on Saturday when his truck climbed a bank of snow at the side of an interchange ramp of the I-94 highway, went over a barrier wall and after a terrifying drop, landed on its roof on a westbound lane of the highway below.
“There was just too much snow on the side of the road that once the tyres got into, like, 2ft of snow there’s no controlling a vehicle of any kind,” Oliver told ABC’s Good Morning America in an interview from his hospital bed aired on Thursday.
“Once the tires got into, like two [feet] of snow, There's no controlling a vehicle of any kind.”
— Good Morning America 💛💛 (@GMA) February 11, 2021
Richard Lee Oliver breaks his silence from the hospital after terrifying footage shows his truck plummeting from an icy overpass. @giobenitez reports. https://t.co/i9rZzYvW4s pic.twitter.com/dtxWuLZsdj
Speaking with some difficulty, his neck in a brace, Oliver choked up when he talked about worrying he might die there, and said two people who witnessed the accident stopped to help.
“They held me in the back of my truck and helped me call my mom just in case I wasn’t gonna make it,” Oliver added.
The authorities were amazed at the stroke of luck that meant the falling vehicle did not hit any traffic below.
Oliver did not reveal the extent of his injuries, but the video showed him in a hospital bed seemingly not moving much, and with facial lacerations. The Milwaukee county sheriff’s office said on Saturday that when officers reached the scene Oliver was conscious and breathing and showing no signs of impairment.
The fall was captured by traffic monitoring cameras from the Wisconsin department of transportation. The video shows Oliver’s truck leaving the ramp in a puff of snow and appearing to flip in midair before landing upside down.
Oliver’s fiancee, Candice Haid, told GMA they were new parents. “I was thankful that he was alive. We have a six-month-old baby at home, so just really happy that he made it through it and nobody else was hurt,” she said.
