The dramatic moment an officer pulled an elderly lady from her engulfed car as it burned on the side of a Michigan road has been captured on video.
On December 16, the Police Department received a report of a burning vehicle stranded in a gulley in Detroit.
An unidentified lady in her 80s was trapped inside a flaming vehicle on Hayes Road when Officer Cameron Rieper raced to the scene.
The former fireman sprung into action, attempting to free the woman from the vehicle, but the bewildered woman clung tenaciously to the wheel. The man said he had to grapple with her to dislodge her hands off the steering wheel.
She finally let go, and he dragged her over the field, getting her far away from the flaming vehicle.
Rieper rests on his knees beside her as more cops arrive at the scene. In the video, he tries to ascertain whether she has been hurt.
There was no immediate danger to the woman’s life, but she is still in the hospital under observation. The cause of the fire in the automobile remains a mystery.
According to the heroic officer’s subsequent interview with reporters, there were flames in the bed region of the vehicle, and the engine compartment was just beginning to catch fire. There was a lack of clarity in the woman’s responses, and she seemed perplexed. After opening the door and removing her safety belt, I attempted to free her from the car, but she wanted to remain inside. She was an older woman. Whether she was sick or what led up to the accident is still a mystery.
Rieper escorted her to Mount Clemens’s McLaren Macomb hospital in an ambulance. He speculated that she could have inhaled smoke.
The circumstances under which the automobile, which was oriented toward the road, wound up in the ditch remain unknown.
If your car is on fire, the US Fire Administration says to pull over, switch off the engine, and get out immediately before contacting 911.
An estimated 1.5 million fires were attended to by municipal fire departments in the US in 2022.
Fires in vehicles were the cause of roughly 3,790 civilian fatalities and 13,250 civilian injuries last year.
An estimated $18 billion worth of property was destroyed in these fires.
