Frame from surveillance footage distributed by Newsflare and posted by The Sun on TikTok.
A white four-door sedan cuts across a pavement toward a short flight of steps in a surveillance clip The Sun posted to TikTok on Sept. 23, and the camera’s own clock, which reads 08:30:48 on the road and 08:31:03 with the car at the steps, covers the whole trip in about 15 seconds. The Sun’s caption says the driver mistook a narrow staircase for a parking bay. The clip names no city or country, and no police report, court filing or agency statement came with it.
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Video: The Sun, via Newsflare, posted to TikTok on Sept. 23.
What the footage shows
The first half is a fixed camera on an ordinary street. A yellow cargo scooter sits parked on the left. The white sedan crosses the roadway toward the pavement, and the only thing between it and the drop is a pair of traffic cones beside the steps. By 08:31:03 the sedan is mostly out of frame, and an on-screen graphic drops a red location pin onto the spot without saying where it is.
The second half is a cut to the aftermath. The rear of a white car sits below pavement level in a narrow stairwell, a flatbed tow truck with its bed tilted down is parked beside the opening, a white SUV is parked on the pavement above, and several people stand around watching. The end card reads “No injuries were reported.” That line is the video producer’s caption. It is not attributed to a hospital, a police force or the driver, and the clip does not identify the driver, say whether anyone was cited, or show the damage.
A Newsflare watermark runs through the video. Newsflare licenses user and security-camera footage to media outlets, which means the clip reached The Sun through a licensing chain, and the clip does not say who owns the camera.
Who pays when a car takes the stairs
The National Association of Insurance Commissioners describes collision coverage as paying for damage to your car “from a collision with another car, an object, a pothole, or flipping over.” Comprehensive, in the same guide, covers non-crash harm such as theft, hail, windstorm, flood, fire and impact by an animal. A sedan that drives into a hole in the pavement is not any of those comprehensive events, so the closest fit in an American policy is collision, which carries the policyholder’s deductible. Whether a particular insurer sorts a fall into a stairwell that way depends on its policy wording, and nothing in the clip says which country’s rules apply here.
The bigger bill is the recovery. A car wedged below street level generally needs a flatbed and a winch, and a car recovered nose-down can come up with damage to the underbody that is invisible from the pavement. What it costs to pull a car out of a hole is a moving target, one Backfire News broke down in a different crash, and the clip gives no number for this one.
A second staircase case, and a different one
This is not the clip Backfire News covered in September. That Kaili, Guizhou province, case came from footage released by CGTN and showed a white sedan on a wide concrete staircase that police and passersby pushed back up. This one shows a narrow stairwell and a tow truck, and nothing in either clip connects them beyond a driver and a set of steps.
What happens next
Nothing public. The clip carries no court date or citation, no insurer has said a word, and Backfire News has not confirmed the location. Which leaves the question the footage already asked: two cones, one stairwell, and a car that could roll straight in from the road.
Should the owner of a building with a stairwell that opens onto a street be required to put a real barrier at the top, or does the responsibility sit entirely with the driver?
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