The accident in which a 54-year-old woman died after her car plummeted from the sixth floor of a car park is a tragedy that could possibly have been prevented. As The National reported yesterday, the driver seems to have reversed her car through a barrier at a multi-storey car park at the Sheikh Khalifa Energy Complex in downtown Abu Dhabi.
While an investigation will determine the circumstances of this fatality, it raises questions about how this could have occurred. Multi-storey car parks should be designed to take into account drivers who, possibly distracted by children, accidentally hit the accelerator instead of the brake.
A well-designed structure would have included barriers strong enough to prevent a simple mistake turning into a fatal one. All high-level car parks should be assessed to see if they are vulnerable to this kind of incident, to prevent it happening again.
