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Posted on 10/09/2005 6:40:01 PM PDT by My Right Foot
By Roger Maynard
A WOMAN spent four nights trapped with two dead companions in the upturned wreck of a car that skidded 45ft down a grass bank. Ada Makiri, 46, a mother of nine, survived on rainwater while pinned under the car.
Barely conscious and with only her left hand free, she said that she thought only of her children as she lay a few inches from her dead friends.
“I called out to them. I asked if they were all right. I felt their pulses, but felt nothing,” Mrs Makiri said as she recovered in hospital from hypothermia, facial injuries and burns.
Her ordeal began in the early hours of Sunday when she was offered a lift by a friend she had met at a clubhouse and whom she had not seen since 1981.
They were joined by another woman and set off at speed on the road between Napier and Taupo, in the North Island of New Zealand. “I wouldn’t say I was scared but it was more than fast because I did hear the other lady saying to slow down — then I fell asleep,” she said.
She did not know how long she remained unconscious but awoke to see the clock on the car dashboard. It read 5.50am. She called out to the others but there was no response and she could not feel any pulse. “Then I just said a karakia [prayer],” she said.
Dazed and in severe pain, Mrs Makiri heard cars passing on the highway and remained hopeful that someone would sound the alert and that she would be found. But the wreck was hidden from the road by the steep bank and dense trees. The hours ticked away but help did not arrive. With her mobile phone battery flat, Mrs Makiri tried to call out and signal with her torch to attract attention.
For four days she used her friend’s water bottle to collect rainwater to keep herself alive. Then Ross Hedley stopped to fetch water from a stream to put out a fire in his lorry.
Hearing a noise, he turned, looked down the bank and saw the upturned car in a clump of blackberry bushes.
“I didn’t know anyone was alive,” he said. “I heard a noise that sounded like a cattle beast, but I thought I’d check out the car anyway. I went down and had a look and there was somebody in there all right. I found a hand just poking out of the door and heard a plea for help.
“I just went to the rescue straight away.”
Mrs Makiri, reunited with her children, described him as her knight in shining armour. “I said, ‘Just come and hold my hand and I’ll be safe and know that you’re there’ — and he did,” she said.
“She’s an incredible woman,” he said. “To go through something like that and find somebody still alive is just incredible. She just fought for survival.”
Remarkable story. But to pick a nit, you don't die of thirst in 4 days, even if you're very uncomfortable.
Wow !!!
Wow !!!
God bless her.
Passed out, as in drunk?
On their way home from a "clubhouse," whatever that is. Nightclub?
I carry my torch in the car with me everywhere.
Torch = Flashlight
Well the article doesn't say. But if she was drunk, I'd say her survival is even more incredible, seeing as how she'd have been dehydrated, right?
The article doesn't give a clue. But they say she had one hand free... what does that suggest to you?
Sounds terrifying.
Mother of nine? It's gonna take a lot more to do her in than a car rolling on top of her....
She proved herself to be tough, didn't she?
I thought this was going to be about the blonde who locked herself inside the car.
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