UK driving instructor has lucky escape after mini-tornado blows FENCE across busy road

A driving instructor and her student had an ‘L’ of a lucky escape when they were caught in a mini-tornado which blew an entire FENCE in front of their car.

Sharon Carter was in the passenger seat of her Ford Focus while she gave a driving lesson to a teenage girl.

Front dash cam footage captured the terrifying moment a 6ft wooden fence panel hurtled past the car during a heavy storm on Sunday (31/10) morning.

Footage from the rear camera shows the fence crashing into the roof of a house in Duston, Northants.

Incredibly, despite the heavy rain and wind, the student calmly manoeuvred around the debris and continued driving along the road.

Sharon, 60, said: “We had just practised pulling up on the right which is one of the manoeuvres in the driving test.

“It had just started to rain. It wasn't anything too horrible at all.

“And as I asked her to move off and we started to get back onto the side of the road.

“Ahead of us you could see almost like a wall of water, so at that stage we weren't in it.

“Within a couple of seconds we were in it, and it was incredibly noisy.

“The wind noise was tremendous and there were leaves flying around.

“We were thinking ‘oh my God, what on earth is going on?’

“We actually did say ‘is it a mini-tornado?’ because neither of us had seen that sort of weather before.

“This the sound was so loud because I don't have the radio on when I'm teaching.

“In the footage you will see what I think is a piece of cladding.

“It was a long white piece of wood that started coming down the road towards us.

“It sort of stops by the black car on the right and I saw the wood coming towards us and I said to her ‘Stop’ because I was worried it was going to hit us.

“So we stopped to avoid that piece of wood and that's when the fence panel came flying past, so we felt pretty lucky, really.

“If I hadn't asked her to stop for that small piece of wood I think the fence panel would’ve hit us.

“I think it was very close. “You’re looking forward so obviously I didn’t see it coming from behind us, but it was very close, it must’ve been within a couple of feet.

“It would’ve done a lot of damage.”

Sharon told her pupil to keep driving to get out of the storm in case they got hit by something else.

The grandmother-of-two added: “I then asked her to pull up and checked she was OK.

“We both ended up laughing bizarrely because it was one of those hysterical situations that you don’t expect to happen.

“We sat there for five minutes or so composing ourselves and then continued with the lesson.

“We realised it probably was a tornado because there were lots of trees down blocking roads.”

Sharon said she was “quite shocked” when she watched the dashcam footage.

She added: “It happened so quickly in the car, but having watched it back I realised that the fence panel was very, very close.

“To see it flying the road and hitting a roof and bouncing off was quite shocking as well because it demonstrated how strong the wind must’ve been.”