On Saturday morning, a teenager from Colorado was flying his drone when he spotted an overturned vehicle whose passengers were fighting for their lives.

 

18-year-old Josh Logue was flying his drone from his home in Brighton, located just 20 miles northwest of Denver, when he noticed a dark spot on the road near a bridge that crosses a canal.

He flew his drone closer so he could identify what this mysterious spot was and realized he was looking at an overturned S.U.V. lying in a sinkhole.

Logue, accompanied by his father and his neighbor Ryan Nuanes, hurried over to the sinkhole. Once they arrived at the scene, they found a 66-year-old man and a 61-year-old woman trapped inside a Jeep Grand Cherokee that was already submerged in water.

In an interview with the New York Times, Logue said, “So we get down there. The horn is blaring, and the car is underwater.”

Nuanes, Logue’s neighbor, is an assistant chief at the Denver Fire Department.

Commenting on the horn blaring when they arrived at the scene, Nuanes said, “I really didn’t like that because, in my experience as a firefighter, that’s typically what happens right after a car accident. The horn gets damaged but the battery still has enough charge in it that it’ll make the horn go off until somebody disables it.”

He reported hearing a man’s voice from inside the partially-submerged vehicle, telling him they had been trapped for about 15 minutes

“He tells us he’s only got about six inches of breathing room,” said Nuanes.

Logue and Nuanes quickly called 911 and firefighters rushed to the scene and began to cut through the metal undercarriage of the vehicle before realizing that they would have to come up with a faster approach since water was continuing to fill up the inside of the vehicle.

The rescue crew then used a pickup truck to roll the Jeep onto its side and open the car that way.

Brycen Garrison, the fire chief for the Brighton Fire Rescue District, said, “The car was completely upside down on arrival. They were able to use some equipment to maneuver the car to its side. Once they were able to do that, they were actually able to open the doors.”

According to a Gabriel Moltrer, a trooper with the Colorado State Patrol’s public affairs office, reported that the 66-year-old suffered a “serious injury,” which he was not able to elaborate on.

The other passenger walked away from the crash without any injuries. However, both the driver and passenger were taken to the hospital for evaluation.

While he was unable to identify the driver and passenger, Moltrer did reveal that they are residents of the nearby town of Keenesburg.