Dramatic rescue in McKinley reservoir

A woman believed to be in her 30s was rescued from her vehicle after it plunged into McKinley reservoir on McKinley Road about 9:30 Thursday morning.

Mitch Tresoor was heading up to Big White with some friends for a day of snowboarding when he came upon the accident scene.

"We could see a black object in the reservoir when we were coming around the bend. I saw another car pulled over so I pulled over as well," says Tresoor.

"It didn't seem like much at the time, but when we got to the end of the reservoir we looked down and noticed it was a car. We didn't really
know what to do, but we noticed there was a woman trapped in the back seat of the car, she's banging on the window and trying to breathe."

Tresoor says the entire car was full of water and the woman was panicking and calling out for help.

"Before we could do anything a policewoman showed up and she ran down the hill. When we got to her we told her to close her eyes and we tried to clear all the glass away and we made kind of like a human chain with our arms. She grabbed on and we frantically tried to pull the woman onto the hill."

He says the woman was shivering and couldn't talk when they brought her to shore.

"We asked her about 10 times if she was the only person in the vehicle and eventually she said yes, I'm the only one. She was shivering bad and was in a state of shock for sure."

Tresoor says he couldn't have imagined what condition the woman would have been in had she been in the water a few more minutes.

Full video coming