Headlights flashing past and a huge bang: Sophie Kats (17) heard and saw a huge crash from her bedroom. A car flew out of the bend in Woudrichem on Wednesday night, over a fence and landed upside down on a company walkway. A man and woman were seriously injured. “A woman shouted: help, help, help!”, Sophie says, still dazed on Thursday.
Sophie couldn’t sleep so she just looked out the window. “I saw headlights quickly go over the dike. Then I heard a loud bang. I heard a squeak because the car went over the railing of the bridge,” says Sophie, she is still full of adrenaline: “I heard the car collapse. Within ten seconds a woman started calling for help.”
Sophie went to her mother and then sprinted outside. She called 911 and climbed over barbed wire to reach the victims. Her mother followed by car.
“It was terrible. They were both hanging in the car,” is how Sophie describes what she saw. “He unfastened his seat belt and came out. The woman was in a panic. She was half hanging out.” Sophie and her mother, who had now rushed over, tried to help them. “Stay down! You don’t know what you’ve got!”
Surprisingly enough, according to Sophie, the police were already there: “A police car happened to be driving around. They drove behind my mother. They asked why she stopped with her emergency lights on,” she says. “I started waving at the police. We were really lucky. We made a hole in the fence because we couldn’t reach it.” Other care providers followed suit.
The car ended up on metal walkways of the De Klerk company on the Hoge Maasdijk. These are used to walk to moored ships. The contractor company makes locks, bridges and quay walls. The car slid over the bridges and only came to a stop 130 meters further, against the bridge structure.
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The site was still littered with car parts on Thursday morning. There are pieces of the bumper, the parcel shelf and even a Volkswagen Golf logo, as an employee shows. There are also remains of one or more liquor bottles. “They’re not ours,” says an employee. “We are leaving everything behind. We have cordoned off the area until the police come to investigate.”
“All the bridges are twisted. He just launched.” The employee shows the enormous distance the car has traveled over the bridges. “He must have been driving very fast,” he concludes.
The victims were rushed to a hospital. It is not clear how they are doing. Due to the seriousness of the situation, a trauma helicopter also landed in Woudrichem. A recovery company worked late into the night to remove the car from the bridge.
