Look out below! Paratrooper crashes through a house and miraculously survives
Atascadero, California - A very lucky soldier just barely escaped death after plummeting through the sky!
A British paratrooper was taking part in a training exercise with American allies last Tuesday at roughly 15,000 feet above Camp Roberts in California.
Called a High Altitude Low Opening exercise (HALO), the maneuver is meant for "covert missions in hostile territory," as the UK Ministry of Defense reported to the Daily Mail.
Locals reported seeing several parachuters and soon noticing that one started to spiral out of control, as his chute did not fully deploy.
It is not clear if a back-up chute was also available and compromised, or if the soldier simply ran out of time to deploy it.
He was unable to aim for the landing zone, and observers watched as he crashed straight through the tiled roof of a nearby home!
Several photos on Facebook showed the extent of the accident: The soldier lay on the floor of the kitchen with his failed parachute stuck in the rafters above him! The remainder of his chute was splayed out above him on the roof.
"I ran in to make sure he was okay, and I checked on him and his eyes were open, but I wasn't sure if there were any injuries," neighbor and trained nurse Rose Martin told local news station KSBY.
She wouldn't let anyone move him until paramedics arrived. He has since been hospitalized for treatment.
Luckily, the owners of the home were out at the time of the incident.
The homeowner's mother reported that the crash was surprisingly clean, with hardly anything inside the house broken during the incident.
"Mainly roof and some sheet rock damaged. Kitchen counters and appliances were unharmed," she said.
More importantly, the soldier didn't land on anything that would have further injured him.
Cover photo: Screenshot/Facebook/usawtfm