(Chip Legett)
Four people in Oklahoma survived being tossed over 100 yards in a pickup truck when they were hit head on by the largest tornado to ever touchdown in the United States.
The incident happened just southeast of El Reno, where the category five twister claimed 18 lives on May 31st.
The owner of the truck, Chip Legett, tells FoxNews.com they’d gotten caught up in traffic trying to get away from the fast approaching storm and pulled over to the side of the road to take cover.
But events turned so quickly, the sky filling with debris, that they didn’t have the opportunity to get out of the truck and down on the ground, as is advised in these situations. So they hunkered down in the truck, a 2011 Ford F-150, and hoped for the best.
Before they knew it, a window was smashed, the back of the truck lifted into the air.
The pickup was then blown across a wheat field, rolling four times before coming to a rest a football field away from where it started.
Legett had his eyes closed, but one of his passengers told him that it looked like they’d gotten as high as 20 feet in the air.
Despite one passenger that unbelted to take cover on the floor being ejected along the way, all of them suffered only minor injuries.
Legett posted his story and a photo of the truck on Ford’s community website, Ford Social. Fortunately, the truck landed upright and the doors could still be opened, allowing the ejected passenger to get back in to take cover from the baseball sized hail that followed.
Sadly, a man who parked his truck nearby didn’t survive a similar ordeal, and the incident occurred only a mile and a half away from where three Discovery Channel storm chasers were killed, impressing on Legett how much luck played a role in being able to walk away from the nightmare.
Nevertheless, he wrote a thank you to the engineers who designed his Ford, and is definitely planning to replace it with another one.