A steel drum weighing thousands of pounds somehow rolled out of a construction site in Pittsburgh and eventually struck and killed a woman who was walking on a nearby sidewalk, police said.

The accident occurred around 10.40am Friday local time in the city’s Oakland neighborhood, where the University of Pittsburgh’s new sports performance centre is being built.

The drum was either knocked over or dislodged from a piece of heavy equipment, police said. It then rolled several hundred feet as it went down a hill, through a fence and onto the sidewalk where the woman was walking with co-workers from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre’s Western Psychiatric Hospital. The drum then went across a road before it came to rest against a pickup truck.

The woman, who suffered a head injury, was pronounced dead at the scene a short time later. Her name has not been released, and no other injuries were reported in the accident, which remains under investigation.

This article was originally published on the NZ Herald here.