A driver on her way to receive treatment at the hyperbaric chamber had a lucky escape when a tree crashed onto her car as she drove along Peel Road.
Jane Perry, of Willowbrook Gardens in Douglas, said she felt lucky to be alive after the tree - one of a number of mature broad leafs that border that section of the road - smashed down on to the back section of her car.
‘It was pretty frightening,’ she said.
‘If it had been a couple of seconds different it could have been much worse. It came down on the back of the car and it really frightened the hell out of me. It just came out of nowhere,’ she said.
Mrs Perry added the trees, which are on private land, appeared to have been affected by the very dry weather in the past couple of weeks and the fallen tree simply seemed to have been uprooted from the dry ground.
‘There was no wind. It looked as if the tree had just lifted from the soil,’ she added.
Mrs Perry was heading from her workplace at BNP Paribas Securities Services on North Quay in Douglas to the hyperbaric chamber when the accident happened on Wednesday.
Th tree completely wrote off her BMW X3 motor car and blocked the road, which is currently one-way heading in to Douglas, until government workers were able to move the branches and clear the road.
‘If it had been a smaller car I don’t know what would have happened,’ said Mrs Perry, who was uninjured.
‘I didn’t know what had happened at first. I wondered what I had done. I was lucky. There was a lot of glass in the car and the windscreen broke but did not fall in. It had not completely shattered fortunately.’
She added she had been grateful for the support of kind passers by who had called police and an ambulance.
‘Then they took my car to the vehicle testing centre to check there were no faults with it - which seems a bit ironic really. It’s certainly a bit of an inconvenience.’
So far she hasn’t made it back to the hyperbaric chamber and is considering alternative strategies for getting there: ‘I think next time I go there I’m going to park at Quarterbridge and walk the rest of the way on the other side of the road,’ she said.