A Pennsylvania driver who fell asleep at the wheel is lucky to be alive after his car crashed head-on into a guardrail while he was driving home from work – and forgetting to wear his seat belt may have saved his life.
When 24-year-old Seth Yoders left his job at a coal mine and headed home to Washington on Tuesday night, he was tired enough to nod off a couple of times during the drive, but thought he could make it home. However, he ran off Route 18 in Washington County and ended up careening head first into a guardrail.
Yoders wasn’t wearing his seat belt and was therefore thrown into the windshield.
“Because he was in the air and off the seat, that guardrail slid directly underneath him and he landed on top of the guardrail,” said an officer at the scene of the accident.
While wearing a seat belt is always advisable, in this case, Yoders would have been impaled by the guardrail had he remembered to do so. Officers were surprised that the accident was not fatal, and so is Yoders – he attributes his survival to “someone watching over me.”
When Yoders came to, he was on top of the guardrail in the front seat of his car, with his legs pinned on top of it.
“I thought it was going to be fatal, to be honest. I’m still surprised it’s not,” said an officer on the scene. “By all reasonable, rational accounts, this gentleman should not be alive.”
Yoders is recovering from his injuries in hospital.