While the whole country is in awe of photos taken of a man wedged inside his mangled truck between two tractor trailers on an icy Oregon roadway, the survivor says he can only thank God he’s still alive – and now wants to figure out why.
FoxNews.com reports that Kaleb Whitby, 27, nearly lost his life on Saturday morning while driving his Chevy Silverado along icy Interstate 84 near Baker City, Oregon. Whitby said the accident resulted when he rounded a bend in the road and came upon a jack-knifed tractor trailor splayed across the road right in front of him. There was no way to avoid hitting it, and he did.
“The next thing I know, I look out my back window and see the lights of a semi-truck barreling down on me,” he told Fox and Friends. “It was then – I didn’t even look at it. I turned back and faced forward and closed my eyes.”
The truck slammed into Whitby’s vehicle, crumpling it as if it were made of cardboard.
Oregon Live reports that after the impact, Whitby opened his eyes to the sight of shattered glass and the feel of the steering column lodged in his right hip.
“I just kept telling myself to calm down,” Whitby said, and fumbled around for his pocketknife to cut himself out of the seatbelt. The next thing he did was call for help.
At about the same time, Sergi Karplyuk, 32, was coming around the same curve and narrowly avoided slamming into the crash scene, which would have meant certain death for Whitby.
Instead, he swerved into a guardrail and jumped out of his truck to survey the scene. That’s when he saw Whitby trapped in a “steel sandwich” between the two big rigs. It was Karplyuk who snapped the photo of Whitby looking calmly out of his window while wedged in just a few feet of space between the two big rigs.
Whitby, who has a 2-year-old son and pregnant wife, suffered nothing more than a bruised eye and a few cuts on his right ring finger, but was able to walk away from the wreck. In fact, he pitched in to help others at the scene which involved 26 other drivers and left 12 injured.
“Everybody talks about your life flashing before your eyes, it didn’t for me,” he told Fox and Friends. “All I could think about is my wife and my son and just hoping that it wasn’t my time and praying that I would be able to get through it.”
He can only thank God that he’s still alive, and adds: “Now I’ve got to go figure out why.”
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