Startling smartphone footage of a man being flung into the air from his vehicle after it flipped several times on a beach has surfaced and gone viral.
The incredible footage, recorded this weekend, was spontaneously captured on a beach in Kuwait and depicts a miraculous survival for the man who, despite being fired roughly 20 feet into the air, had a soft landing and walked away.
The video begins on Abu Hasaniya Public Beach in Kuwait City with a Toyota FJ Cruiser on a joyride at the water’s edge. Suddenly the car hits the gas causing the only other person on the beach to quickly scarper to safety.
The four-wheel drive skirts on the water’s edge but begins to fishtail and as the back end of the car comes around the car flips over with surprising force and begins to roll. On the second spin, the man (presumably the driver) is fired out of the window like a human cannonball. Traveling backward, he does one and a half somersaults before crash-landing in the shallow water.
Somehow, he quickly picks himself up out of the water and with a limp drags himself onto the beach as he’s greeted by a crowd of people. The person filming can be heard laughing.
While the man appears to be okay, his car definitely isn’t. The Daily Mail reports that the fire department attended the scene to remove the Cruiser from the water with official later seizing the vehicle.
If Only a Photographer Had Been on Hand
Bizarre moments such as this one are now always almost recorded via video on a smartphone. The footage is riveting; but what if a photographer had frozen the moment in crystal clear quality? Would that be a better image?
The incident in Kuwait is reminiscent of Stanley Forman’s 1975 photograph Fire Escape Collapse. Forman won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography for his picture showing Diana Bryant, 19, and Tiare Jones, 2, falling from a collapsed fire escape in Boston. If the tragic accident happened today (in which Bryant lost her life) it seems more likely that it would be smartphone footage that captured the moment rather than a stills camera.