Man narrowly escapes being hit by metal ‘spear’ while driving on M50

Our. Actual. Nerves.

A man has spoken about a Final Destination-type experience he had while driving on the M50 last week. Jason Piggot was leaving the M1 and heading southbound towards Galway on the motorway on Thursday afternoon when he found himself behind a lorry transporting several cars. The lorry swerved in front of him and all of a sudden, his windscreen shattered. "I was bewildered," he told Joe Duffy on RTÉ Radio 1's Liveline. "There didn't seem to be any accident so I didn't know what had happened." Surrounded by glass inside the car, Jason managed to pull in and stop at the side of the motorway. "I had no understanding of what had happened until I looked over my shoulder," he added. In the back seat of Jason's car was a piece of metal about a metre in length that narrowed into a spear shape at one end. It had bounced off the bonnet of the car and shot through the windscreen before hitting the middle seat in the back, right between his two kids' car seats. The metal bar was part of a leaf spring from the suspension of a large vehicle, he later found out. Miraculously, Jason was unharmed but he admitted that had he been hit, he mightn't have gotten out of the car alive. "This thing, the weight of it... I can't imagine what kind of damage it would have done. It would have been catastrophic," he said. Christ.