Video shows giant spool of cable rolling through busy Newmarket intersection

It's not every day that you see a giant spool of fibre optic cable rolling down a busy street at rush hour.

But that was precisely the scene that Eugene Kim stumbled upon on Friday morning as he made his way to a Costco in Newmarket.

Kim was headed westbound along Green Lane Avenue just after 9 a.m. when he arrived at a red light at Yonge Street.

• Watch the moment in the video player above

Footage of the incident, captured by Kim’s dash camera, shows a giant spool of cable taller than most vehicles slowly rolling across Green Lane Avenue across several live lanes of traffic.

At one point the slow-moving spool nearly comes into a contact with a stopped vehicle, however the driver is seen pulling ahead into traffic just in the nick of time.

The spool then comes to a stop against a median.

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Kim told CP24.com that the “bizarre” scene appears to have resulted after the spool fell off the back of a transport truck parked further up on Yonge Street.

He said that a telecommunications company has been busy installing fibre optic cable across Newmarket over the last month or so, making the large spools of blue cable a familiar sight for most residents.

What is not familiar, he said, is the sight of one of them rolling down a street towards traffic.

“It was so bizarre seeing that thing just roll down the street and that car (in its path) was lucky that they saw it too,” he said. “It was like a comedy show after that. You then see another guy running down to try and retrieve it and a couple other people stepped out (of their vehicles) to help. But they were all trying to push it over the curb and you could see how heavy it was. It was like three big guys and it just wouldn’t go. So that just tells you kind of how dangerous and how catastrophic the situation could have become.”

Kim said that the incident appeared to unfold without any damage to vehicles or injuries thankfully.

But he said that he is “grateful” that traffic was stopped along Green Lane Avenue at the time.

“It was a big thing and it looked like it had quite a bit of momentum already when it rolled down so people could have been hurt,” he said.