"It was horrible, horrible. You can only understand it if you have experienced it."
Eva Alicia Carrillo de Ortiz struggled to find the words to describe her ordeal after a construction canopy collapsed nearly on top of her car at the San Ysidro border crossing Wednesday morning, injuring 11 people.
The 60-year-old Tijuana resident, who was driving, and her husband had just cleared the inspection booth. That's when she saw panels and beams starting to fall around her.
"It was like they were pieces of paper falling and turning to dust," she recalled. "It was a matter of seconds."
The couple had crossed the border on the left-hand side of the port of entry but could not proceed onto Interstate 5 because that access is closed due to the construction project under way.
Instead, they were forced to move to the two lanes on the right-hand side, where all traffic is funneled, which routinely causes a bottleneck. It's on that side that the collapse occurred.
"It is precisely because we could not move that I didn't want to get too close to the car in front of me," she continued. "And that's when I could see that the roof was collapsing horribly.
"I was terrified."
That extra room she gave herself proved to be Godsend, she said.
She was able to quickly maneuver around the car in front of her and bolt into a lane that heads into secondary inspection, with a trail of cars following her.
Ortiz said the only thing she was thinking about was to get away from the danger and to give the others behind her a chance to escape, too.
In the inspection area, U.S. customs agents gestured for her to stop to question her. She did not stop. They had not realized what had just happened, she said.
She told the agent at the exit of that area that the roof had collapsed. He seemed surprised, she said. He checked on the radio, and then started to let cars proceed on their way.
Ortiz said she saw the agents run to the area where the collapsed had occurred, then stop at its edge. "It's like they didn't believe what was happening."
"I could see that vehicles were trapped in the rubble," she continued. "I saw that something had fallen on a dark pickup. I had told him, 'Step on it!' Step on it!' But he couldn't do it."
Ortiz, who had crossed the border to eat with a friend, said she still felt panic hours after the accident.
"I'm still feel very nervous, very shaky," she said. "It's nothing that I will easily forget."
Eva Alicia Carrillo de Ortiz.
editorial@sandiegored.com
