A 23-year-old American woman has been rescued alive a week after her vehicle plunged off a 200ft cliff in California. Angela Hernandez was found by hikers on Friday after they spotted her jeep partially submerged at the bottom of the cliff in the Big Sur area.
Hernandez, from Portland, survived by using her jeep's radiator hose to siphon water from a nearby creek, according to the Monterey County Sheriff's Office. She was conscious but suffered a shoulder injury.
She told investigators she had swerved to avoid hitting an animal on Highway 1, California's famous coastal road, while driving to Los Angeles to visit her sister. The fall and subsequent week alone left her in a traumatic state.
Monterey County Sheriff's Office spokesman John Thornburg said she was lucky to be alive. 'It's usually the fall that gets them, or the ocean that gets them, and she was lucky to survive both,' he said.
Her sister Isabel wrote on Facebook that Hernandez would need time to recover, describing the ordeal as 'very traumatic'.
