A Colorado teen flying his drone to check out flood damage in the area this weekend wound up saving the lives of a couple trapped in their Jeep upside down in a sinkhole.
Josh Logue, 18, took a closer look at the feed from his drone after first thinking it was a shadow. That's when he saw the overturned vehicle in the sinkhole in rural Weld County about two miles from his house.
When he raced to the scene, he realized just how serious it was when he saw the people trapped. He called 9-1-1 and gave them a general location, Denver 7 reported.
"They had six inches of room of an air pocket in there for them to breathe. But the rest was water."
Ryan Nuanes, Logue’s neighbor and a Denver firefighter, was at the teen's house when he spotted the SUV. He also said time was running out.
“This had the potential for the emergency to get worse because my concern was that the water was going to infiltrate that hole and it was going to fill it up,” Nuanes said adding that the rescue by Brighton firefighters was a bit unorthodox but it worked.
“The equipment that any fire department had has to be augmented by heavy equipment to get into something like that. What we ended up doing was backing one of our pickup trucks up to the hole and throwing a chain on the pickup truck, and then some tow straps. The Brighton Fire Department pulled it forward, and Brighton was able to pull them out,” he explained.
The man who was driving and not wearing a seat belt was seriously injured, while the belted passenger was not hurt, according to the Colorado State Patrol.
