Despite getting hit by a car, Amelia the cat is in good spirits

She could have been destroyed by the heat of the truck engine, or passed over as road kill. She could have even been splattered over the Cowlitz River to wash away like another fallen leaf.

An 18-month-old cat tumbled out of a truck crossing Washington’s Allen Street Bridge on June 3. Disoriented, she was then hit by another car in traffic, then somehow jumped over the guard rail, falling 70 feet and landing on the asphalt below. She should have died, but somehow, she survived.

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A driver following the truck that carried the cat watched in horror as the events unfolded. Shocked by the jump, the observer weaved through traffic, eventually finding her way under the bridge, where she searched for the cat that she assumed was dead.

Instead, the good Samaritan found the cat crouched under a van in a parking lot, and called the Humane Society of Cowlitz County for help.

Vets examined her, and found that she escaped the hit and fall with just a broken front leg and a cracked palate in the roof of her mouth.

“It hit the ground so hard, it cracked the palate, it was about a two-inch crack,” Rick Johnson, the shelter’s executive director, tells PEOPLEPets.com. “Takes a pretty good force to do that.”

They named her Amelia, Johnson says, because “she flew.”

She went home that night to be fostered by a shelter volunteer, and lost a litter of kittens. “No one knew,” Johnson says. “[That first day,] everybody was more interested in making sure the cat lived.”

Since, Amelia’s leg has been set in a cast, and her palate is healing as well. She is also extraordinarily well-tempered, gets along with cats and humans, and has a personality that’s “absolutely perfect.”