You might think you’re watching a clip from Final Destination, but the harrowing video you’re going to see is 100 percent real life. Uber Driver Derek Gooderham was driving his Tesla Model 3 on Interstate 83 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania when all of a sudden, Gooderham noticed a truck carrying a pile of lumber on I-81 above him hit a guardrail.
“Once we saw the truck was sliding, once it hit the guardrail, the whole load it was carrying just snapped off and it just came barreling down,” Gooderham told ABC27. From there, the pile of lumber spilled onto the road, completely enveloping a car in front of him and bum-rushing it right off the road. The entire incident was captured on the Model 3’s built-in camera system.
Miraculously, the driver of the vehicle that was swept off the road was okay. “I just saw him come out of the car,” said Gooderham. “He was staggering up, raised his hand up, which I was assuming he was signaling that he was okay.” The driver may have been fine, we’re fairly certain his car was completely lumber-jacked up; we can make that joke because the driver was all right, so save your emails!
As for Gooderham’s vehicle, it came out of the incident completely undamaged. He credited the braking system in his Tesla for helping him come to a stop just in time to keep him out of the wooden chaos. “Once I realized the incoming danger, I just slammed on my brake and I don’t even remember moving to the side of the road,” said Gooderham.
It wasn’t lost on Gooderham that things could have ended much worse. “Had I been going on just a little bit, maybe like one or two miles per hour faster, I probably could have potentially gotten impaled,” he said.
It was extremely lucky that the driver of the wood-slapped vehicle, Gooderham, and his Uber passenger all came out of the incident unharmed, although we doubt any of them are going to be knocking on wood anytime soon.
