SUV makes a splash in Hawaii Kai

A Honolulu couple’s driving lesson took a wrong turn Saturday, their Toyota SUV crashing through a fence in Hawaii Kai and landing in a swimming pool. Fortunately, no one was hurt. “As we landed in the pool, I remembered a movie and I waited for the water to fill the car and then I opened the door,” Pat Campanella, 56, told the Honolulu Advertiser. He was teaching his wife, Mimi, how to drive, when she overcompensated in a turn at the intersection at Kamilo Street and Niumalu Loop. The woman whose pool the vehicle landed in, 80-year-old Katherine Peacock, was celebrating her birthday that day and joked with onlookers that it was her birthday present.

While the unusual sight landed on the front page of the Honolulu Advertiser, the company that pulled the van out of the pool with a crane said it’s nothing they haven’t seen before. “We do approximately three of these jobs a month,” Devin Statts of Affordable Towing told KITV.

The 2001 Toyota Highlander, which was worth about $20,000, is most likely a total loss, having sat at the bottom of the pool for two days while the owners searched for a company that could retrieve it. The recovery, which KITV captured on video, cost about $3,000.