Teen with drone discovers couple trapped in Jeep that fell into sinkhole
A miraculous rescue happened Saturday morning in a remote part of Brighton. Two people were trapped upside down in a sinkhole as water filled their car. Their unexpected savior? A teenager with a drone hobby.
"I fly down here all the time just looking," said 18-year-old Josh Logue.
Saturday morning, Logue flew his drone over a nearby Denver Hudson Canal, usually a dry creek bed, but due to recent rain, it's a flowing river. His dad and neighbor looked on.
Suddenly, he noticed a sinkhole where Weld County Road 2 crosses the canal, with something inside it.
"I said, 'What is that?' And I flew down over it and it's a car in the hole," said Logue.
They immediately got in their car and drove to the site. His neighbor, Ryan Nuanes, just so happens to be the assistant fire chief at the Denver Fire Department.
"I never expected this on my day off," said Nuanes.
They found a Jeep Cherokee with its horn going off, at least 6 feet down a massive sinkhole.
"When I first came down here, I wasn't expecting someone to be in the car," said Logue.
But then they heard voices.
"There ended up being two people, a man and a woman, that were trapped inside the car upside down," said Nuanes.
The couple said they were submerged in water with only 6 inches of breathing room.
"The concern that I had, as a firefighter, was that this river was gonna swell even more and it was going to then trap those people underwater," said Nuanes.
Brighton Fire Rescue and the Adams County Sheriff's Office responded quickly, using Logue's truck to pull the car up enough to free the couple.
"In my 25-year experience as a firefighter, this was the most real and most dire extrication that I've seen," said Nuanes.
The couple was driving home to Keenesburg when the crash happened Saturday around 9:15 a.m., just 15 minutes before Logue spotted them on his drone, according to Colorado State Patrol.
"If the water rose just a little bit more, it would have been a recovery, not a rescue," said Nuanes.
Nuanes says the road was closed the night before because it was washed out elsewhere, meaning there would have been even less of a chance of the couple being found.
"It must have happened sometime between last night when they closed the road, and this morning when the car drove into it, that the sinkhole developed and nobody knew about it," said Nuanes.
The two people in the Jeep were taken to the hospital. The driver, a 66-year-old man, has serious injuries. But thanks to a teenager's hobby, they're both alive.
A photo taken by Nuanes shows the Jeep completely upside down and inside that sinkhole.
"A young man with the drone really saved some people's lives, cause you couldn't see this vehicle except for an aerial shot," said Nuanes.
Adams County crews began filling the hole Saturday, but they say it could take weeks before the road is safe to open again.
