Driver’s miracle escape
Published: July 10, 2006
Quick action by two men may have saved a woman’s life near Charbon on Saturday when they pulled her from the driver’s seat of a wrecked car seconds before it burst into flames.
The driver lost control of her light coloured Toyota on the notorious “dips” section of Cooper Drive between Kandos and Charbon. The car ran off the road and down an embankment, landing upside down atop a stump which speared through the crushed roof just to the left side of the rear view mirror.
One of the rescuers, Terry O’Brien, said he narrowly missed a collision with the vehicle involved in the accident as it fishtailed down the road after coming over the top of a steep hill.
Mr O’Brien said he pulled as far as possible off the road with the vehicle in which he and Sue-Ann Matthews, both from Sydney, were travelling. He said he watched the other vehicle move back onto the correct side of the road after going past his car and then plunge down the embankment.
Mr O’Brien raced down to the vehicle, which had landed on its roof, and was joined by another man just as smoke started to appear from the car.
They quickly pulled the driver out though the window of her car, fearing the worst, but the woman miraculously appeared to have sustained only minor injuries. She was taken by ambulance to Rylstone Hospital.
Emergency services crew later said they could not believe how lucky the driver was as the stump which punched through the roof of the vehicle missed her by only inches.
The fire in the crashed vehicle was quickly brought under control by another man, who arrived soon after with a portable fire extinguisher. Local fire crew from the NSW Fire Brigades and the Rural Fire Service attended the scene and made sure the fire was out.
At the time of going to press, police had not released the identity of the driver whose car crashed or of the two men who helped Mr O’Brien rescue the woman and control the fire.
The area of the “dips” on Cooper Drive has been a matter of concern by locals for some time and has been earmarked by Mid-Western Regional Council for improvements.
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