A 73-year-old Manitoba man whose truck plunged off a bridge last week into icy water says even as the water rose up past his neck, he knew he would get out.
Ken McInnes was out delivering a trailer on Friday morning along a rural road not far from his home in St. Claude, Man., when he hit a patch of ice as he approached a short bridge. His truck skidded and the trailer along with his truck plunged into the frozen waterway below.
"I couldn't believe it. About that time, I thought, ‘This is going really bad,” McInnes remembers thinking.
As the truck sank slowly under the ice, the cabin of McInnes’ truck filled with water. He tried over and over to open the truck door but says it was stuck. He tried to smash the driver’s side window a dozen times with his knife but to no avail. McInnes says he knew he was running out of time.
“The water was right up pretty well to my nose so I knew then that the door better open the next try,” he says.
Mercifully, it did. But as McInnes began climbing out, his boot got stuck in the truck door. With some more struggling, eventually he broke free.
He swam through the ice-filled water to the river bank. A man driving by the bridge stopped and helped him up the bank before calling 911.
McInnes was taken to hospital, but with no actual injuries, he was discharged from hospital just a few hours later.
The 73-year-old believes that part of reason he survived this crash is because he’s emerged unscathed from other close calls before.
He once had to rescue a man in freezing saltwater off the coast off Alaska, and another time, he walked away from a rollover in the Australian desert. He says those incidents gave him the confidence to believe he’d emerge from this scrape too.
“I expected to get out,” he said. “I just knew it.”
With a report from CTV Winnipeg’s Beth Macdonell
