Woman trapped overnight after South Ottawa crash
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Cars hummed down a dark stretch of Stagecoach Rd. on Wednesday night while a woman lay injured, cold and alone just meters away.
She was invisible to their headlights, though she probably could have seen the bright beams playing off the tops of the trees by the road.
But no cars stopped because she was seven metres down a steep embankment, south of Old Prescott Rd., near where her car had crashed at 9 p.m.
The woman, 54, had swerved to avoid an animal, sending her Ford up and over a grassy knoll then plunging down the nearly perpendicular far side.
The car lodged itself against small trees, the impact shearing the bark from their base.
Though the woman was hurt, she managed to free herself, but when she got out of the car, she tumbled further down the slope.
She hurt her knee and couldn’t move, not even to return to her car as the temperature plunged to 6C.
She might have lain there for days had workers at a neighbouring gravel pit not happened upon her car at about 8:30 a.m.
“It was coincidence that we were here,” said Allan Arcand. “This isn’t open very often.”
“We saw her from the side and that was just luck,” added Dawson Stanley.
They found the woman near her car.
“We went over to her right away,” said Arcand. “She was conscious, she had been there since nine o’clock last night so we took our coats off and we covered her up and called 911.”
She was cold and injured — paramedics treated her for knee, elbow and facial injuries, and for mild hypothermia — but she was otherwise OK.
“We just consoled her and kept her company and talked with her until (emergency crews) showed up” said Arcand. “She was in excellent spirits, I couldn’t believe it. She was just so happy to see somebody.”
Firefighters arrived and laid down ladders so they could reach her.
“She’s fortunate that she got spotted,” fire spokesman Marc Messier said.
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