SAN MIGUEL COUNTY, Colo. — A woman from the Western Slope crashed in the San Miguel River last month and was stranded there for 12 hours until rescuers found her the next day.
“When we first got there, we heard her hollering out,” said Sgt. Michael Donnellon with the San Miguel County Sheriff’s Office. “She was conscious and talking, but she was hurt.”
The San Miguel County Sheriff’s Office said it happened on Colorado 145 near mile marker 93 on Aug. 26. The woman's U-Haul flipped on its passenger side in the river.
The Sheriff's Office, along with San Miguel Search and Rescue, Telluride Fire, Norwood Fire, Colorado State Patrol, Colorado Department of Transportation and Careflight out of Montrose, spent about three hours rescuing the woman, start to finish.
"You feel horrible for somebody that has to go through that,” Donnellon said.
The U-Haul was flipped on its passenger side, and the sheriff’s office found the driver against the passenger side window and under the glove box. The Telluride Fire Department cut the roof through the windshield get her out.
“They had that roof off within minutes, but it's so technical removing somebody with serious injuries out of a vehicle like that, and then up an embankment, because we don't want to cause any further injuries to her,” Donnellon said. “So it took about two, two and a half hours, three hours.”
“She was overcome with emotion,” he said. “You could tell that it was a sense of relief that she was finally out of that cab. She had a lot of pain when we were moving her. But she was a tough cookie.”
A helicopter took her to a hospital in grand junction. Donnellon said it wasn't the first accident of its kind.
“That stretch of roadway has seen, over the years, accidents of similar nature,” Donnellon said.
There are no guardrails on the stretch of Highway 145 where this driver went off the road.
“Guard rails definitely serve a purpose. It would be wonderful if we could have them on all of our, every stretch of our roadway. But unfortunately, we just can't do that, which then creates a limited shoulder in a curved area,” Donnellon said. “Guard guardrails are difficult because, CDOT, they have to remove snow. We have boulders that come down onto the roadways, mudslides. They have to be able to push that just road debris from our weather off of the roadway. If we have guard rails, we can't really do that.”