On Tuesday, along a mostly empty Canadian highway, the laws of physics grew bored and decided to have some fun with an errant box truck.
The 24-year-old driver of the truck appears to have gotten momentarily distracted, which caused him to drive off the road, into a culvert, and then, somehow, instead of ending up with the truck rolled in the grass, he ended up with his truck improbably wrecked into the roof of a house alongside the road.
I’ve seen the video and I’m still not exactly sure how it happened.
The whole thing was captured by the dashcam of Denis Lefevbre, who was returning home from work on Highway 64 about 60km south of Sudbury, Ontario:
So what exactly happened here? Thankfully nobody was injured, so let’s try and break it down:
OK, so, first, everything is fine, truck is on the road, all is good.
Next, we see the driver, possibly distracted by something, begins to veer onto the shoulder of the road, where the truck starts to drive into a ditch.
It appears the truck has run up along the forward slope of the ditch, causing the truck’s nose to raise and start to climb out of the ditch.
Now things get confusing. Something has impeded the truck’s forward progress, causing the front end of the truck to pitch down, and the rear end to shoot upwards.
At this point I think some of the electrical/utility lines have caught the underside of the truck, raising it off the ground even more?
The truck’s remaining momentum appears to swing the truck around so the rear impacts the roof of the house.
The truck finally settles, rear end firmly wedged into the poor house’s roof, and very comprehensively boned.
Again, police report no injuries to the driver, the 25-year-old passenger in the truck, or the people who lived in the house, who were on the property but luckily not inside the home at the moment a truck backed into their upper story.
The moment when the driver flops out of the truck and takes a few steps back to survey the damage is pretty remarkable to see; the disbelief that so much could have gone so dramatically wrong in such a short span of time has taken over that dude.
One moment he’s accidentally drifting a bit off the road, and the next thing he knows he’s managed to turn his truck into a ramp onto some innocent house’s roof. I bet everything took a good long moment to sink in.
Ontario Provincial Police are investigating careless driving charges, but at the moment no criminal charges are pending.
Honestly, I’d be almost more impressed than mad, and I hope the insurance companies settle everything and maybe give the dude a commemorative T-shirt and a stern warning to pay attention, because very, very weird shit can go down.