Here's what the driver of the car told the Chron:
[D]river ... Mohammad Alcozai of Dublin, got out almost immediately after the impact. The victim hit the roof and back window of the 2002 four-door Camry, totaling the car. A split-second difference in timing and the worker might have landed on the windshield, with potentially terrible consequences for Alcozai.
“It was a miracle,” Alcozai told The Chronicle.
A traveling tech specialist, Alcozai said he was supposed to go on a call to Walnut Creek on
Friday morning, but after it was canceled he wound up in San Francisco. As he was about to turn onto California Street from Montgomery, his car’s navigation system went blank, so he slowed down.
As the system turned back on, he sped up — “and that’s when something hit my car with a terrible thump,” he said.
“With all the changes in where I went and how I was going this morning, I think God wanted me to be there just at the moment that poor man fell,” Alcozai said. “It was a miracle that he was able to fall in my car, and it was a miracle that I was OK.
“I just hope he comes through all right.”
Original post (Friday, Nov. 21): San Francisco police and state safety officials are investigating a Friday morning incident in which a window washer reportedly fell from the roof of an 11-story Financial District building onto a passing car.
The worker suffered injuries described variously as "serious" and "critical" and is being treated at San Francisco General Hospital. The driver of the car was uninjured.
Police said the still-unidentified worker was working with equipment on the roof of the building at 400 Montogomery St. when he fell for unknown reasons.
Cal/OSHA is investigating and says the man involved in the 10:03 a.m. incident was employed by Century Window Cleaning. The agency says the firm was cited and fined in 2008 for several safety violations.
More details:
CBS San Francisco reports:
The window washer and a co-worker were adjusting their cables from a platform above when something went awry and the worker ended up falling 11 stories onto the car, completely caving in the back part of the Toyota Camry’s roof.
The accident victim was rushed to San Francisco General Hospital with critical injuries, but the person in the car managed to escape without significant injury.
Sgt. Danielle Newman with the San Francisco Police Department said that pedestrians below in the busy Financial District were very lucky to have escaped injury and that the window washer was lucky to have fallen on the car because it broke his fall.
NBC Bay Area adds a witness's brief account:
Samuel Hartwell, who was on his way to a meeting, saw some of what happened: "I saw a blue streak out of the corner of my eye," and then that "streak" hit a car with a great "thud." Soon afterward, Hartwell realized that "streak" was a person.
From ABC7:
Bianca Bahman, 31, a pre-med student at San Francisco State University, was walking to the gym saw the man's shadow as he was falling and then saw him land on a Toyota Camry approaching the intersection.
The car's roof caved in and there was blood everywhere, Bahman said. She ran to the man to see if he was OK and said there was blood coming from his ears and he was gasping for breath as he rolled off the car onto the ground.
A coworker remained on the roof and Bahman said she could hear him screaming.
Cal OSHA has sent a safety engineer to the scene to look into the incident. The agency expects to determine by Friday afternoon whether it will open an official investigation into the incident.
Friday's episode is the second high-rise window-washing incident in the news this month. Last week, two workers were stranded more than 800 feet up the side of New York's 1 World Trade Center building. They were rescued uninjured.
Although such episodes are attention-getting, observers often point out that high-rise window-washing is safer than many other occupations.
KQED's Ted Goldberg contributed to this post.
