Published: June 11, 2009 10:18 pm      

Emergency crews pull McDowell man from mountainside wreck

BISHOP, Va. — Emergency responders from Tazewell County, Va., and law enforcement from McDowell County rescued the driver of a pickup truck that crashed Thursday afternoon on a remote mountain road that connects an old mine site in West Virginia with the Abbs Valley Road in Virginia.

A 31-year-old Elkhorn man driving a Mazda pickup truck slid off the old Gary No. 14 Mine road at a point called School Bus Curve. The site of the accident is in McDowell County, but about one mile from the Abbs Valley Road, according to Tommy Carroll, administrator of the Bluefield, Va., Rescue Squad. Tazewell County 911 dispatched Boissevain, Va., based Rescue 945 and the Bishop, Va., Volunteer Fire Department to the scene at 1:40 p.m., and requested assistance from the Bluefield, Va., Rescue Squad.

“There was one person involved,” Carroll said. “The truck was sideways when it went off the road. It went about 15-20 feet off the side and got caught on its side between a rock and a tree. There were other trees on the hillside, but there was a vertical drop of about another 70 feet that it would have gone down if that tree hadn’t stopped it. There is no guardrail there.”

It took Carroll and John Brown, a technician with the Bluefield Rescue Squad, 23 minutes to arrive on scene. “It was a hard wreck to describe,” Carroll said. “The rock was in front of the truck and the tree was in the middle of the door. We had to cut the roof off to get to the driver and use a wrecker to set the truck back on its wheels and open the door to get him out safely. The windshield was out and the steering wheel was in the passenger side of the truck.

“We went down to the crash site with ropes,” Carroll said. “The Bishop firefighters, Rescue 945 emergency responders and firefighters from Abbs Valley Volunteer Fire Department held the ropes or blocked our feet from sliding down the hill while we cut the top off the truck with a combo-cutter.

“He (the victim) was conscious through the entire extrication,” Carroll said. “After we cut the top off and got the door open, we had to roll the dash off of him to get him out. We got him out of the pickup by taking him down the hill. Everything was down the hill. He had a possible fracture to his lower left leg and a possible head injury.” Carroll and Brown got the victim on a back board and the emergency responders pulled him back up the hill in a Stokes basket.

Carroll said that emergency responders set up a landing zone at the intersection of Gary No. 14 Road and Abbs Valley Road where Medflight picked up the victim and transported him to Bristol Regional Medical Center in Bristol, Tenn. “It took us 47 minutes to extricate him,” Carroll said.

Deputy Mike Pertee of the McDowell County Sheriff’s Department responded to the crash site, but was still on scene late Thursday afternoon and could not be reached for comment.

– Contact Bill Archer at barcher@bdtonline.com