A hobby – we all have them. Some of us paint. Some of us woodwork. Some of us like to knit.
Some fly drones. Maybe in the process, save lives.
So when a Colorado teenager decided to check out flooding that had happened in his county recently, he assumed he’d see floodwaters. Instead he found a sinkhole. And it wasn’t empty.
Eighteen-year old Josh Logue said he just wanted to try and get some footage of the flooding from a recent storm. Instead he found an odd looking black spot on a road not too far from his home.
“I fly down here all the time just looking,” Logue told CBS News. “I said, ‘What is that?'”
And I flew down over it and it’s a car in the hole.”
The fast-thinking teen ran to his nextdoor neighbor, Ryan Nuanes, who just happened to be the assistant fire chief for the Denver Fire Dept. After calling for help, the pair drove down to the spot, roughly two miles away.
“So we get down there. The horn is blaring, and the car is underwater,” Logue said.
Firefighters prepare to rescue two people whose car had crashed through a sinkhole. Photo courtesy of the Colorado State Police
Inside the sinkhole was an upside-down SUV. Inside were two people, alive but in danger. The vehicle was filling with water.
Once there, the man inside the SUV said he only had “about six inches of breathing room.”
“The concern that I had, as a firefighter, was that this river was gonna swell even more and it was going to then trap those people underwater,” Nuanes said.
Rescue crews arrived, and used a truck with a hook to connect to the vehicle and roll it on its side. Once they had the vehicle turned, they were able to pull the passengers out through the door.
The driver, a 66-year-old male was taken to the hospital with a serious injury. His passenger, a 61-year-old woman, was uninjured. While details about the man’s injury were not released, police did say that he was able to walk on his own away from the accident.
“It must have happened sometime between last night when they closed the road, and this morning when the car drove into it, that the sinkhole developed and nobody knew about it,” Nuanes said.
Firefighters rescue two people whose car had crashed through a sinkhole. Photo courtesy of the Colorado State Police
Later he and Logue found out that the couple had only wrecked about 15 minutes before Logue spotted them with his drone.
“That’s another godsend from the kid with the drone,” Brighton Fire Rescue battalion chief Colin Brunt said.
I don’t know how long these people would have been there if he hadn’t flown that drone right by there.”
Nuanes said he ‘never expected this’ on his day off. “In my 25-year experience as a firefighter, this was the most real and most dire extrication that I’ve seen,” he said.
“A young man with the drone really saved some people’s lives, cause you couldn’t see this vehicle except for an aerial shot,” Nuanes said.
Watch below for a look at the amazing rescue!
