Woodworker rescues motorist at night from freezing brook
Toolbox
By JOHN P. GREGG VALLEY NEWS - Published: December 21, 2009
SOUTH ROYALTON — A 53-year-old furniture maker driving home on a lonely country road late Thursday night noticed tire marks cutting through a snowbank and wound up rescuing a motorist trapped in the frigid waters of Broad Brook.
Randy Leavitt was headed south on Broad Brook Road in South Royalton around 11 p.m. Thursday following a weekly music jam session with friends when he saw "a cut on the side of the road where there shouldn't be one."
When he stopped to investigate, Leavitt spotted car lights and found a Toyota Camry upside down in the brook, motor still running, with its headlights on.
Leavitt scrambled down the steep bank, landing in the brook and found the driver with only his head above water, trapped in the car.
"I spent a few minutes … trying to get him out the door, but I couldn't get the door open" wide enough, said Leavitt, who thinks the car might only have been there for a few minutes before he arrived.
Fire officials said temperatures that night reached minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit, and ice had formed on parts of the brook.
The driver, later identified as David Martineau, a tenant in a home in nearby East Barnard, was "barely semiconscious" and speaking from time to time, said Leavitt, who spent some of the time holding the driver's head above water.
"He responded to my questions sometimes, but I couldn't understand what he was saying," Leavitt said. "I heard him say a couple of times he didn't think he could make it."
Leavitt was able to pull Martineau "through the door enough so that when I left, he was kind of jammed and he couldn't sink back under," and ran across the road to a nearby home to summon help.
He also called Peter Cole, a self-employed landscaper who lives a quarter-mile away on the road, who pulled on rubber boots and a leather jacket and raced to the scene.
"When I got there, we had all we could do to save the fellow," Cole said. "The driver's side was completely submerged, and the water was running through the car."
Cole, who had one foot on the bank and one on the car, was able to wrench the door open. "I just grabbed it and ripped it. The adrenaline gets going," he said. "The water was freezing cold; it was liquid ice."
The two rescuers were able to pull Martineau from the car, but said they were unable to get him up the steep bank because of his weight. Instead, they hoisted him on top of the car and waited several more minutes for help to arrive.
Dave Whitney, fire chief of South Royalton Fire and Rescue, said responders lowered a ladder down the bank and pulled the motorist up the bank on a Stokes litter.
"I would say he was in pretty serious condition … hypothermia," Whitney said. "I would say Randy probably saved his life."
Martineau was taken to Sharon Elementary School, then transported by DHART helicopter to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. He was discharged Friday, according to a hospital spokesman.
Martineau was back at his East Barnard home Friday, but a message left for him through his landlady was not returned.
Leavitt, who runs Freight House Woodworks in South Royalton, said he had to be helped up the bank himself because of the cold and fatigue, having spent about 20 minutes in the brook holding Martineau up.
"I'd wrapped my coat around his head. It was all wet, and frozen solid," he said.
Leavitt said the incident reminded him of how his grandfather, then a truck driver in his 20s, had a premonition as he drove past a field decades ago one summer's day, turned the truck around and went back to the field and found a farmer trapped under a tractor.
That same grandfather used to say, "'You see somebody stuck in a snowbank, you always stop,'" Leavitt said.
Cole said the accident was a reminder about the hazards of country roads in winter, especially those that parallel brooks and rivers but often have no guardrails.
Only a few cars an hour, at best, travel down Broad Brook Road at that time of night.
"It is wintertime and these are back roads," Cole said. "Regardless of the conditions, you just have to pay attention."
Vermont State Police also responded to the scene.
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