The driver escaped serious injury after the rock shattered her windshield.
ANCHORAGE , Alaska - A boulder broke loose above milepost 113 of the Seward Highway Monday afternoon and crashed into a moving car, blowing out the windshield in a section of road currently under a seasonal hazard traffic pattern for falling ice and rock hazards.
The strike knocked the rearview mirror into the cab and left rock debris across the roadway, according to a witness’ account. Kelby Dillon said he and his father had just left the airport and were headed home to Girdwood when they entered the slowed section near the icefall area. “We were slowed down and we kind of looked up and there was a big kind of dust cloud coming off the side of the cliff,” Dillon said.
“They were in the trajectory that we knew that they would be landing into the northbound traffic on the Seward Highway,” Dillon said. “As we were slowing down, we noticed that it struck one of the vehicles pretty seriously.”
Before opening the door, he said, he looked through the broken glass to see what was inside. “I definitely took a look at the windshield and the damage to the vehicle just to get a kind of an assessment of what inside the cab was going to look like before we got there, because it could have been pretty bad,” Dillon said. “I pulled the door open, and she was okay. She was very shaken up and visibly shaking and was pretty scared.”
“She was totally fine. I mean, she wasn’t cut up. There was no visible blood,” Dillon said. “There was no visible signs of any type of harm done to her other than being very shaken up and scared.” “Once I got in the car, I realized it knocked her rear view mirror off into the vehicle, and it completely shattered her windshield, and there was glass shatterings all over inside of the vehicle,” Dillon said.
Dillon said the driver may have avoided more serious injury because of where the boulder hit the car. “It could have been way worse,” he said. “It was lucky it kind of hit the pillar, the front pillar of her car, and it didn’t go completely through the windshield.”
After the woman was out of the vehicle, Dillon said, the danger shifted to the roadway itself. Rocks still covered the highway, and another boulder was lodged underneath the damaged car. “I kind of pulled her car forward until the large boulder high-centered me, and then backed up and just kind of powered through it to get her car off the road, get the highway back open.”
“My dad was, and other people, there was a ton of other people, kind of kicking rocks and rolling big, giant rocks off the highway,” Dillon said. “Luckily she was going slow because that could have been way worse if she was going 65 miles an hour,” Dillon said.
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