Photo: Ashley Holland / thestar.com
One woman from Hantsport, Nova Scotia, Canada, has earned the moniker of “Supermom” after she single-handedly managed to bring her 4-year-old daughter to safety, after the car they were in landed on its roof in a frozen pond.
It happened over the weekend, as Ashley Holland was driving her daughter, Macy, to a birthday party. The Toyota Corolla they were in hit black ice and she lost control. She recalls the car flipped a couple of times and ended on its roof in the frozen pond, with all the windows shattered.
“When something like that happens, it’s like your parental instincts just kick in, right? And you do what you need to do to get your child to safety,” she tells CBC Radio’s Mainstreet segment. And that’s exactly what she did: she fought and struggled and managed to get her child to safety.
Holland managed to unfasten her seatbelt as frozen water started filling the car. She could hear her daughter in the back, crying in her carseat about how she was “going to die” and thinking that she needed to get her out of the water as quickly as possible. The car rolled over on the driver side, lifting Macy out of the water, and this gave Holland enough time to unfasten one of the straps on the carseat. Macy did the rest.
“I just grabbed her and pulled her out and I tried to keep her above the water. I didn’t want her to be hypothermic,” Holland recalls. “So from the waist down she was soaked, but I mean her hair didn’t even get wet and I don’t know how I did it.”
A passerby had noticed the car in the water and pulled over. Holland and Macy made it to his truck and got inside to warm up, and in the meantime, firefighters responding to another call also stopped to check on them. They were offered clean, warm clothes and were able to avoid getting hypothermia.
Holland suffered some cuts and bruises to her legs, but Macy wasn’t hurt at all. The firefighters say that it’s rare that one of these incidents doesn’t result in a fatality, and call it a “miracle.”
“When something like that happens, it’s like your parental instincts just kick in, right? And you do what you need to do to get your child to safety,” she tells CBC Radio’s Mainstreet segment. And that’s exactly what she did: she fought and struggled and managed to get her child to safety.
Holland managed to unfasten her seatbelt as frozen water started filling the car. She could hear her daughter in the back, crying in her carseat about how she was “going to die” and thinking that she needed to get her out of the water as quickly as possible. The car rolled over on the driver side, lifting Macy out of the water, and this gave Holland enough time to unfasten one of the straps on the carseat. Macy did the rest.
“I just grabbed her and pulled her out and I tried to keep her above the water. I didn’t want her to be hypothermic,” Holland recalls. “So from the waist down she was soaked, but I mean her hair didn’t even get wet and I don’t know how I did it.”
A passerby had noticed the car in the water and pulled over. Holland and Macy made it to his truck and got inside to warm up, and in the meantime, firefighters responding to another call also stopped to check on them. They were offered clean, warm clothes and were able to avoid getting hypothermia.
Holland suffered some cuts and bruises to her legs, but Macy wasn’t hurt at all. The firefighters say that it’s rare that one of these incidents doesn’t result in a fatality, and call it a “miracle.”
Google News