A San­gre Grande moth­er and her two teenage daugh­ters man­aged to es­cape ma­jor in­juries yes­ter­day, af­ter the car they were in plum­met­ed sev­er­al feet in­to a riv­er and land­ed on its hood.

While the in­juries were not life-threat­en­ing, Denise Woods and her daugh­ters Sier­ra Wills, 19; and Tay Wills, 13, un­der­went a se­ries of tests at the hos­pi­tal to en­sure they had suf­fered no ad­verse ef­fects.
Both girls are stu­dents of Bish­op Anstey High School East, Trinci­ty.

The in­ci­dent oc­curred at 8.55 am, as Woods was dri­ving her Nis­san Navara west along the Ari­ma Old Road.

It was al­leged that up­on reach­ing the bridge at La Re­source Road, the van picked up a skid and Woods lost con­trol be­fore crash­ing through the bar­ri­er in­to the riv­er sev­er­al feet be­low.

Woods re­port­ed­ly suf­fered pains about her body but bore no vis­i­ble signs of in­juries.
Sier­ra com­plained of body pains with no vis­i­ble in­juries; whilst Tay suf­fered a lac­er­a­tion to her fore­head and side of her face. She was bleed­ing and had to be as­sist­ed by passers-by be­fore med­ical per­son­nel ar­rived.

A pass­er-by who stopped to help the trio was an­gered by those who opt­ed to record the un­for­tu­nate in­ci­dent, rather than lift a hand to as­sist the trapped women.

Ado­ra Williams said, “If you see some­thing, do some­thing be­cause it makes no sense stand­ing up and record­ing, when peo­ple’s lives in dan­ger.”

Williams said peo­ple around who wit­nessed the in­ci­dent ran straight to the riv­er and up­on see­ing a leg ex­tend­ing out­ward from the wreck, “tried our best to get them out in a safe way”.

The woman said those as­sist­ing didn’t think twice.

“You have to do some­thing to save some­body’s life.”

Ar­riv­ing on the scene short­ly af­ter the ac­ci­dent oc­curred, for­mer Ari­ma MP un­der the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship gov­ern­ment, Rodger Samuel, cred­it­ed the CEPEP crew who had been work­ing near­by, heard the com­mo­tion and rushed to Woods and her daugh­ters’ aid.

He said, “They had to use tremen­dous force to pull the doors open.”

Samuel said he crawled in­to the ve­hi­cle, which had ac­tu­al­ly sunk in­to the riv­er bed, to re­trieve some of the women’s per­son­al be­long­ings, in­clud­ing the girls’ book-bags.

He added, “For the chil­dren and moth­er to be alive and safe, I thank God for that and I thank the CEPEP group that was work­ing in the area.”

Samuel said the group had per­formed yeo­man ser­vice in the res­cue ef­fort, as the ter­rain was slip­pery.