OKLAHOMA CITY — A dramatic scene played out in Oklahoma City as a water rescue was captured on camera, according to KFOR.
“I’m stuck – um – on a dam on Hefner where Ski Island is and I’m pushed up by the railing, and I cannot get out of it. There’s just been so much flooding. I don’t even know why I chose to do this. This is stupid. I didn’t think it was as bad as it is but I can’t get out of it,” said the driver in a 911 call.
The saving grace was a guard rail that held her SUV from a full-fledged sweep into the fast-moving water.
“My car is starting to fill up with water.”
“Can you get out?”
“I’m afraid – I can’t.”
“We found this utility vehicle behind us with one person inside, and it was pinned up against the guardrail,” Benny Fulkerson with the Oklahoma City Fire Department told KFOR. “We had about 25 firefighters who are out here. We’ve brought our dive team. We’ve deployed a boat, and we had spotters downstream and also on the sides of where the victim was.”
Rescuers eventually pulled her onto the boat and then to shore.
“When they got her out of the boat, they had to hold her up. She wasn’t walking very well,” witness Debbie Cawthorn told KFOR.
“A little shaken up, obviously she was scared and as she probably should have been,” Fulkerson said.
Emergency crews were not only working against the water but time as well. If the guardrail snapped, the rescue could have been much different.
“That vehicle would have flipped over and in the water and it would have been a much treacherous rescue,” Fulkerson said.
