Featured Image Credit: GMA
Topics: Good News, News, US News, Cars, Technology
Kit Roberts
A teen drone pilot ended up saving the lives of a couple trapped in a car after spotting their vehicle with his drone.
Josh Logue is a regular drone pilot and had been flying his drone over the Denver Hudson Canal in Colorado. This is usually dry but had water that Saturday morning due to recent rainfall.
Then, at around 9.30 he spotted an overturned Jeep lying in a sinkhole. From ground level the vehicle would have been much more difficult to spot, but the drone's camera saved crucial minutes.
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Josh, 18, said: “I fly down here all the time just looking.
“I said, ‘What is that?’ And I flew down over it, and it’s a car in the hole.”
Two people were trapped inside the vehicle. They had been stuck in there for around 15 minutes when Josh spotted them. The Jeep's horn had been blaring non stop, meaning that their cries for help were obscured by the noise.
While they were able to breathe at that moment, the water level was rising and another six inches or so could have meant tragedy.
Logue's dad Jake had been catching up with neighbor Ryan Nuanes, who is a firefighter with the Denver Fire Department.
Nuanes said: “I never expected this on my day off.”
He added: “There ended up being two people, a man and a woman, that were trapped inside the car upside down,”
“As a firefighter, the concern that I had was that this river was gonna swell even more and it was going to then trap those people underwater.”
They jumped into Nuanes' pickup truck to investigate, and arrived to find that sections of the road had been closed off.
In an alarming twist, it transpired that the jeep was not visible from ground level, and the only way it could have been spotted in the sinkhole was from the drone.
Nuanes said: “In my 25-year experience as a firefighter, this was the most real and most dire extrication that I’ve seen.
“If the water rose just a little bit more, it would have been a recovery, not a rescue.”
After Nuanes made a second emergency call, Brighton Fire Rescue District, Adams County Sheriff’s Office and Colorado State Patrol responded after around 10 minutes.
He said: “A young man with the drone really saved some people’s lives because you couldn’t see this vehicle except for an aerial shot.”
Rescuers found a 66-year-old man and a 61-year-old woman in the Jeep. The woman had no serious injuries but the man, who was not wearing his seatbelt at the time according to the police report, was rushed to hospital in need of urgent care.