Lucky escape

By Paul Pickering
TWO WOMEN were extricated from the site of a dramatic car crash in Belgrave last Tuesday.
Police said a 37-year-old driver lost control of her vehicle on Monbulk Road, 200 metres north of Micawber Tavern at approximately 11.15am.
Her white sedan careered over a roadside retaining wall, ploughing down a fern-clad bank before landing on its roof four metres below the road.
As they lay trapped in the upturned vehicle, the driver and her 24-year-old passenger, both of Patterson Lakes, could only beckon desperately to the plateau above for help.
Astonishingly, their calls were answered by two witnesses with extensive rescue-response training – an off-duty Belgrave police officer and a telecommunications worker from Lilydale.
Craig Foulis, a Telstra technician who specialises in manhole and pole-top rescue, was travelling in the opposite direction and narrowly avoided the errant vehicle.
“We thought the worst because the car was completely upside down, and it was pretty well smashed up,” Mr Foulis said.
“If the two of us hadn’t seen them, it would have been some time before someone would have found them because the car wasn’t visible from the road.”
After phoning for emergency assistance, the pair descended the steep bank to find the women in severe distress.
“After we ripped one of the doors off, we got them out of the car and assessed to see if they were okay,” said Mr Foulis.
The two rescuers then set about helping the victims to the road above.
“That was the hardest thing because it was so steep,” Mr Foulis said.
“We had to carry one on one side of me, on my shoulders, and sort of push the other woman up.”
Having negotiated the unstable bank, the two men comforted the shaken victims until an ambulance arrived to transport them to Dandenong Hospital. They were said to be in a stable condition.
The attending officer, Belgrave senior constable Darren Wright, said: “They were both extremely lucky.”
He said the accident was most likely caused by oil from local truck and bus traffic making the wet road particularly slippery, and that speed had not been a concern.
The car was pulled from the heavily wooded ravine by a heavy haulage crane.
Mr Foulis, who was in between jobs in the hills, said it was difficult to return to work after the incident.
“It shakes you up a little bit.
“You realise if you’d been a couple of seconds earlier you could have been involved in it,” he said.
The off-duty policeman who coordinated the rescue preferred to remain anonymous.