A 40-year-old California man narrowly escaped death last week after a rock smashed the roof of his vehicle just minutes after he got out thanks to a phone call from his wife.
“That call saved my life,” Maurice Henao told the Washington Post.
The California native, who used to spend a few minutes in his car reading his messages before entering his home, had just got out of his vehicle grumbling after his wife asked him to bring her bag home.
At that moment, a large boulder destroyed the driver’s side of his vehicle, which was parked on the Pacific Coast Freeway in California, where he had just been parked.
But the incident is just one of many in California, where landslides have occurred in recent weeks due to heavy rain and flooding, contributing to the closure of several roads and the deaths of some of the 20 storm-related deaths.
“There’s always rocks falling because it’s a ravine,” Sergeant Christopher Soderlund of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department told the American media. The rain makes the situation worse.
For his part, Henao said he still gets goosebumps at the thought that his wife didn’t call him that day.
“A car is replaceable, but my life is not,” he concluded.