Rescue on Highway 101
Date: July 25, 2005

It happened just like it does in the movies.

James Coughlin and I were on our way to our offices at Floyd’s Corporate Support Center from Rockmart, where we had gone over that practice’s financials, when a car stopped suddenly in front of us.

Cars were scattered all over the road. There was smoke, and people were out of their cars. James pulled over, stopped the truck, grabbed his sports medicine kit and ran toward the wreckage. I called 911.

A white SUV was in the middle of the road with two people who were conscious but bleeding. James checked with them to make sure there were no apparent major injuries. Then he moved on toward a second car that had crashed into the guard rail.

There was a lady kneeling beside a young girl, maybe 3 or 4 years old, who was battered and bleeding. James put gauze on a cut on the child’s face and told the women tending to her to hold the girl still and not to move her.

While all of this was happening, the 911 dispatcher kept me on the phone asking me for details. She was conveying what I was saying to the rescue guys who were coming, and she kept telling me to get closer.

What I saw next told me more about my co-worker than words could ever reveal.

As I moved closer, I saw James, putting himself in danger, trying to get the wrecked car’s driver, a pregnant woman, out of harm’s way.

It was amazing. He just went up to the car without a thought for his own safety.

Smoke was billowing from the hood of the car. James and a few other men lifted the back of the car and moved it away from the guardrail to help them get to the woman, but they still could not reach her.

The car was filling with smoke, and the woman was begging for someone to get her out. James climbed inside. He later said he was trying to move her seat back to get her out of the car from the back. When that didn’t work, James climbed on top of the car, and with the help of the other men, bent the window frame of the car door down and out of the way.

Normally you wouldn’t move someone injured like this in a wreck, but the car was going to blow up. James never hesitated.

He reached into the driver’s seat and pulled the woman out of her car into the waiting arms of two other men. James then climbed down from the roof of the car and helped the woman get away from the burning car.

He helped the woman to lie down and immediately a series of explosions and fire erupted from her car. Fearing the car would explode, sending metal and glass in their direction, James enlisted another man to help move the woman and child to a safer place.

Just as they laid her down, the car exploded into a ball of fire and smoke.

James stayed with the woman, holding her head to prevent any injury to her neck until EMS and firemen arrived.

There were other people on the scene that day, but James was the initiator. He was the one with the medical experience. He was the one calling the shots. He risked his own life, and he wasn’t going to leave that woman in her burning car.

There was no thought of, “Let’s see if anyone else is helping.”

James saw someone in crisis, and he decided he would do everything he could to help.

One of the firemen at the scene told James what I already knew: he saved a life that day.

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