3 Teens Survive Unbelievable Car Crash

Car goes over cliff, ends up on top of driver; everybody's fine
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Apr 3, 2015 2:31 PM CDT
3 Teens Survive Unbelievable Car Crash
The wreck: An indentation in the roof saved the driver, who was pinned beneath the vehicle.   (Strawberry (Arizona) Fire Department)

Somehow, this ends well: An SUV with three teenage girls went off a 100-foot cliff in Arizona, and the 16-year-old driver was thrown from the vehicle as it flipped and landed on top of her. It took a while for rescuers to get all three freed, but everybody came away with only minor injuries. As KPHO explains, the driver wasn't seriously hurt because the vehicle's roof got dented as it rolled, and the girl ended up in the resulting cavity of space between the roof and the ground. Rescuers got the two strapped-in passengers out of the car in an hour, but it took four hours to delicately raise the car with inflation bags to free the driver, an operation that involved passersby gathering rocks to place under the SUV.

"I just remember we had gone really fast around this corner and the car started to lean over, and we all kind of had that moment of, 'Oh crap, this is going to happen,' and then the car just started rolling," says passenger Danielle Goldberg. The girls were returning home from a day of swimming, and police say there's no sign of drugs or alcohol involved in the crash in a remote desert area near Strawberry, reports AP. The driver was the only one not wearing her seat belt. (In New Jersey, two women survived going off a bridge when their SUV landed upright.)

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