A woman is expected to recover after she mistakenly drove her car off of the seventh floor of a parking structure in Austin, Texas last month.
The Austin Police Department released security footage of the incident Thursday, showing the BMW come crashing down onto a Chevrolet Tahoe below.
Police said as the car flung to the ground, it hit the building across the alleyway, rupturing a gas line. The fire department said the rupture was controlled and there was no leak.
Authorities said the unnamed woman did not appear to be intoxicated and was sent to a local medical centre to be treated for potentially serious injuries.
Police said they are still investigating the exact cause of the crash.
William Burch, who was driving the Tahoe, said he was parking in the alleyway below the structure on his way to inspect a construction site he is managing when he heard loud noises.
“My window was down and I heard something really loud and abnormal, so I just started driving forward and the vehicle landed on the backside of the Tahoe,” he told CBS Austin.
He was not injured in the incident.
Police say the woman mistook the brake for the accelerator, causing her to crash through the suspension cables.
A similar incident occurred last September at the same parking structure.
A man drove through the barrier cables which wrapped around his tires, suspending his car from the ninth floor. He was able to safely climb onto the structure as his car dangled in the air and was uninjured.
CBS Austin reports that code enforcement officers will be urging the parking structure’s owners to replace the cable barriers with concrete.
The owners GTT Parking released a statement following the July incident:
We regret the unfortunate accident that happened today in our garage and are thankful that no lives were lost.
A similar incident happened in September 2016 in the same garage, but on a different floor.
This morning, the car apparently hit the barriers at a rate of speed sufficient to break-through and hit the building across the alley.
The garage was built in 1979, and these are the only two such incidents since its construction 38 years ago.
After the previous incident, we engaged a structural engineer to review the situation, and repairs to the safety barriers were performed according to his recommendation. The City of
Austin permitted and inspected such repairs to their satisfaction.
Premier Parking, the manager of the parking garage, manages over 400 parking locations across the United States, and they have not experienced anything like this in their 15-year history other than the previous incident.