by Donald Wood
Last updated: 12:00 PM ET, Tue September 26, 2017
A French tourist is being called a hero after he saved a bus full of people from driving over a cliff.
According to BBC.com, the unidentified 65-year old tourist was sitting in one of the front seats when the 76-year-old driver collapsed as the bus was driving down a winding road near Schwaz in the Austrian Alps Saturday.
The bus began driving toward a 328-foot cliff when the French tourist jumped out of his seat and stepped on the brake pedal as hard as he could to avoid disaster. While the bus slammed into a wooden safety barrier, the collision helped prevent the vehicle from careening over the cliff.
In total, four people were taken to a local hospital.
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The image shared of the crash on Twitter showed the tour bus smashed into the wooden guardrail and leaning over the steep cliff, just inches from what would have been a certain tragedy.
[READMORE]READ MORE: Swiss Couple Found Frozen in Alps 75 Years Later[/READMORE]
Local police officials said the crash was a "breadth from catastrophe," and that the passengers onboard were incredibly lucky that the French tourist managed to stop the bus just seconds before a much more serious crash occurred.
This wasn't the first time a tour bus in Austria was involved in a similar incident. In 2004, five tourists were killed when their bus drove over a 98-foot embankment near the historic town of Salzburg.
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