Car Slams Into Derry Twp. Municipal Building

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DERRY TOWNSHIP (KDKA) -- In the middle of the night, alarms started going off at the Derry Township Municipal Building on Route 982.

"Looked on my phone, we have cameras, and I didn't see nothing happening," Derry Township supervisor Vince DeCario said. "[I] was looking through it, you know, just woke up, and I got a call from the fire chief saying, 'You better get down here. Someone hit our building with a car.'"

A Kia sedan went on a quite a ride.

"He was coming south on 982, went off the roadway, just missed a telephone pole and just kept angling towards our parking lot, went into the parking lot, over the curb and right into the building," DeCario said.

The car came to a rest inside the township secretary's office, leaving behind a hole about four feet wide under a window and causing a lot of structural cracks in the bricks.

"The inside of the building... the wall busted out on the inside, so what we had to do -- that was our secretary's office, where everyone comes in and they speak to her first," DeCario said. "So what we did was board it up as good as we can, then we come back into work at 7 a.m., and we had our crew come in and clean up. We called a contractor, and he boarded up the outside. Now we are waiting for the insurance company to come down and go from there."

The township supervisor says the driver of the car was incoherent and sitting in the back of an ambulance when he got on the scene, but he says things could have been a lot worse.

"He's very lucky. He could have hit the telephone pole. He could have hit the building at a different angle. There's all kinds of different things. It could have been in the middle of the afternoon when we are walking in and out of this building constantly," DeCario said.

In the end, there's about $30,000 worth of damage, but the cracks have been sealed and the secretary's office has been relocated.

Now, they just wait with plans to begin repairs after the winter weather breaks.

"It was scary just looking at it when it happened at night, but just imagine if it was during working hours, what it would have been."