GULF SHORES, Ala. (WKRG) — Upside down, twisted and smashed. A camper with a couple from Canada inside it was tossed by wind in Gulf State Park in Gulf Shores, Alabama, Thursday morning.
“It was just terrifying,” said camper Charlie Raymond, whose site was nearby. “It was just awful.” As the wind started building early Thursday morning at the campground at the park, he says couldn’t sleep.
“It was blowing hard and our camper was rolling and bouncing and all kinds of squeaks and noises,” said Raymond.
That’s when he heard it.
“This loud crash,” Raymond recalls. “I opened the window and looked out and I see that camper just blowing across the road. Then it slammed up against another camper on the other side of the road upside down.”
Kayla James heard it too.
“I wasn’t sure what had happened,” said James. “It never even crossed my mind that something like that [could happen].”
She and her family were camping just one site away.
“It was upside downwards and busted all up,” said James. “The camper it had hit, the windows was busted out and stuff.”
Firefighters from Gulf Shores Fire and Rescue responded to the 911 call and told Nexstar’s WKRG they found one of the camper’s occupants, a man, had been thrown from the vehicle and was trapped underneath it when they got there. At the last report, he was listed in critical condition. The couple’s names have not been released as of Friday.
As crews repaired the damage to the campsites, a grill, bicycles and a picnic table weighing almost a hundred pounds were fished from the marsh. Raymond knows as bad it as it was, it could have been worse.
“Thank God that camper was there because the way that thing was rolling it would have been out in the middle of the marsh,” said Raymond. “There was nothing to stop it.”
