NEW PORT RICHEY (WFLA) – A New Port Richey woman driving on the Suncoast Parkway received the scare of a lifetime. A long-handled shovel flew through the air and became wedged in Joyce Durbin’s Volkswagen Passat.
Had it hit a few inches higher, that shovel likely would have crashed through Durbin’s windshield.
The ordeal happened more than a week ago as she headed to Tampa, but the evidence is still lodged in Durbin’s vehicle. “I see this shovel flying through the air. And it’s like, this is not good”,” she recalled. “It hit the car ahead of me, bounced onto their roof, bounced on to the road between the two of us and embedded itself in my grill.”
Durbin has kept the garden tool right where it is, hoping to show her insurance adjuster exactly what happened.
She said the vehicles were driving between 60 and 70 mph when the shovel hit. She doesn’t know where the shovel came from. While Durbin’s Passat needs repair work, she’s fine.
“My angels were watching over me that day. Boy, oh boy,” she said.
Durbin said she sees violations all the time. “People need to be responsible when they put a shovel on their vehicle, or a ladder, or a can of paint; that it needs to be tied down. It needs to be secure. Somebody, it could have went through my windshield” she said.
More than 200,000 crashes between 2011 and 2014 occurred in the U.S. because of debris, according to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. Those crashes “resulted in approximately 39,000 injuries and more than 500 deaths,” a report on the study says.
A Florida man almost died when a heavy piece of metal smashed through his windshield, NBC Miami reports. “I was driving on the interstate when a torpedo essentially went through my windshield and hit me in the face. There’s really no reason why I should be here,” Holden Amory told NBC News.
