A Powhatan County, Virginia, public-school bus picked up an unsuspecting passenger on its regular route Thursday morning when a deer came crashing through the windshield. The fortunate ungulate got up and left the bus through the front door, and nobody was injured. But the video is unbelievable.
The speed indicator in the onboard video from the school bus shows the deer came crashing through the windshield at 47 mph. It’s hard to tell, but considering the angle of approach it seems as though the deer somehow cleared the hood of the bus and entered the windshield at a clean angle. Perhaps it was jumping.
The animal landed uncomfortably on its back after vaulting over the front row seat and onto a sleeping student. (It was around 6 a.m., so who can blame the kid?) The sleepy kid’s head was luckily tucked down in the seat gap, which helped prevent taking an entire deer to the dome. The deer then managed to get up while the bus was coming to a stop, so the driver opened the door and the deer hopped out under its own power.
Nobody was hurt, according to WTVR CBS 6, except perhaps the deer, but the driver did report that it galloped off into a field.
The first thing I noticed from this 16-second video is the way the student in the front is hunched over. My middle-school and high-school bus drivers were notoriously eagle-eyed for safety and would never let you rest your head like that. If they couldn’t see your head, you were a liability. So in my case, perhaps I would not have been so lucky as to avoid the deer .