SEATTLE — A couple say they're lucky to be alive after a row of 26 power lines fell on the Seattle street they were driving on, with one wooden public utility pole striking their SUV.
"If it had hit the glass rather than the roof, it would have just come through," Tom Cook said in an interview with KOMO-TV. "And the firefighters said the same thing, had it hit to the left or the right, it would have come down on one of us."
He and wife Linda Cook were driving in their Ford Edge on Friday when wooden poles on the west side of the six-lane road started collapsing. One impaled their SUV.
The crash was so sudden that they said they didn't realize what had happened and called out to each because the pole that separated them blocked their view of each other.
"Seeing the photos of the vehicle, if I had seen those photos as a bystander or after the fact and I looked at the photos, I would have said somebody died in the car," Tom Cook said. Live wires were strewn all over the road that abuts Seattle's Museum of Flight and King County's Boeing Field airport.
It took about an hour for emergency crews to turn off the power and safely extract the couple from the vehicle.
They were taken to Harborview Medical Center and treated and released the same night. Tom Cook left with five stitches but otherwise they only suffered cuts and bruises.
Seattle City Light said it is investigating what happened and said the poles were fully inspected just three years ago.
Tukwila, Wash., police have released video, shown above, of the pole striking the Cooks' car. The video reveals that a bicyclist barely escaped getting hit as well.
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