“She’s a lucky girl,” Allen County Undersheriff Bryan Murphy said of Iolan Alexa Setter Friday afternoon, half an hour after the car she was driving struck the east end of the old iron bridge over Indian Creek on Utah Road about eight miles northwest of Iola.
Setter, on her way to work in Burlington, suffered minor injuries, mainly bruises from deployment of the car’s air bag.
Murphy said Setter told him she looked away from the road for a second or two and when she looked back, the end of the bridge was fast approaching.
“She got back over into the roadway enough to avoid a head-on crash,” he said. “It could have been much worse.”
As it was, the passenger side of the car hit the bridge and the door was impaled by the bridge’s iron girders.
“We’ll need a crowbar,” Murphy said to dislodge the door from the metal.
The accident occurred shortly after 2 o’clock.
The bridge, scheduled for replacement in a year or two, was built in 1927.
Driver ‘a lucky girl’
