Man miraculously survives after being impaled by 'two stakes of wood' in horror M53 crash
Share:
A man who survived a horrific motorway crash where he was impaled will have his story live on thanks to the efforts of his son. Mark Hayes was a passenger in a flatbed truck which was travelling just outside of Chester when a HGV driver veered off the motorway and onto the embankment in May, 1989.
As he tried to steer the lorry back onto the carriageway he hit 40-50 yards of fencing and as a result two long planks of timber flew into the flatbed truck Mark, from Ellesmere Port, was a passenger in and he was impaled. First on the scene was the ambulance service, arriving six minutes after the first call, shortly followed by fire engines.
It took an hour to rescue Mark from the cabin of the truck and he had to be cut from the vehicle. Emergency services also had to remove either end of both the planks of timber. The then-26-year-old was in surgery for seven hours as surgeons dealt with the injuries, which included ruptured ribs and diaphragm and damage to his lung, spleen, pancreas, small bowel and large bowel.
The driver of the HGV admitted reckless driving and driving with excess alcohol before being jailed for six months and banned from driving for three years. Mark, against all the odds, recovered from the crash and spoke to BBC's 999 following a reconstruction of the incident. He said in 1992: "When I came round in the cab and I realised we'd crashed but I didn't know what the extent was.
"I went to get up but I couldn't move, but I could just see these two stakes sticking out my stomach and I just went mad. I just screamed, the pain was so intense it was unreal I went into shock, I couldn't feel anything and I went tired, I just wanted to go to sleep.".
