Yahoo News Driver has miraculous escape after car plunges 300m down cliff from Britain's steepest road
Emergency services staged an early morning rescue when a car plunged more than 300 metres down a cliff after crashing on the UK’s steepest A-Road.
Firefighters, paramedics, police and lifeboat volunteers raced to the scene after the car left the A39 in north Devon on Saturday morning.
But incredibly the driver escaped unharmed and managed to climb up the ravine to get help.
Dramatic pictures show the small hatchback smashed up at the bottom of the cliff after rolling down the 1,000ft drop and landing on boulders just metres from the sea.
.The car crashed off part of the A39 near Porlock Hill which is the steepest A-road in the United Kingdom.
Tony Joslin, force incident manager at Devon and Cornwall Police, said: “It looks like the driver has had a pretty miraculous escape.
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“The car has gone from the top to the bottom. It’s about 300 metres to 400 metres from the top and it is actually ended up on the ground – about 10 metres from the waterline.
“The damage to the vehicle is extensive. It’s a complete mess.”
Lifeboat volunteers battled through gale force winds with four-metre swells to reach the remote location where the car had come to rest.
Coxswain Carl Perrin, from the RNLI in Ilfracombe, said: “Our volunteer crew performed well to assist the police and coastguard in the search for casualties.
“The team have trained extensively to carry out this kind of task and today they used their training and local knowledge to carry out this search with strong winds and a heavy seas making conditions challenging.”
A spokesperson for Devon and Cornwall Police added: “We received information of debris on the road in the area where the accident was reported.
“Further investigations revealed the vehicle had gone off the road down into a ravine having had serious damage caused to it.
“The driver of the vehicle was subsequently located apparently uninjured.
“The damage to the vehicle was such that the driver of the vehicle was taken to hospital as a precautionary measure to conduct an examination to look for any internal injuries.”
