Heroes pull pair from sinking car

Driving in a bad storm, a couple pulls over to play it safe. But what looks like a puddle turns out to be perilously deep.

By RICHARD DANIELSON

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 28, 2000

PALM HARBOR -- In a blinding thunderstorm on U.S. 19, Lillian McCarthy decided to play it safe and get out of traffic.

"I was afraid that I'd hit somebody or somebody would hit me, so I pulled off," said Mrs. McCarthy, 81, who lives in the On Top of the World condominiums in Clearwater. Her 87-year-old husband, Howard, whom she calls Max, was with her for a Wednesday afternoon trip to the auto tag office.

But the spot Mrs. McCarthy chose was not the puddle it appeared to be. It was a drainage ditch filled with about 6 feet of water. In an instant, water began pouring through the air-conditioning vents, the weight of the engine tilted the Ford Tempo forward and the car started to sink.

"I said, "What am I going to do?' and Max said, "Back up.' Well, there was no backing up," she said. "Right away we were right up to our necks in water. The car filled up with water immediately."

Just behind her, Faith Hull of St. Petersburg was about to pull in to Team Savage Power Sports, just south of Curlew Road, to pick up her personal watercraft.

Hull, a 35-year-old insurance agent, said it was raining so hard she could barely see the McCarthys' Ford, but it looked "like the angle was weird," and she realized the car was sinking.

Hull whipped her Jeep around, parked and dove into the ditch. Immediately behind her, Team Savage mechanic Lucas Chaffin, 22, was returning from lunch. He, too, stopped and jumped in the ditch.

At the same time, Noel Hughes, one of Team Savage's owners, and sales manager Joe Stutz ran from the business and dove into the ditch, too.

The four soon realized that the weight of the water outside the car made it difficult to open any of the doors, and the McCarthys seemed too shocked to roll down the windows or unfasten their seat belts. All the while, torrential rain continued to dump water in the ditch and bolts of lightning struck frighteningly nearby. But all four said that once they were in the ditch, they focused on the McCarthys.

"Once you got there and jumped in, your adrenaline was going and you really didn't know what was going on," said Hughes, 28, of Dunedin.

Hull agreed.

"It was very dangerous, but you don't think about that," she said. "I had this lady looking right at me, and I realized that if I didn't get her out, I would have to live with that thought for the rest of my life."

With the Ford floating in the ditch and taking on water, Hull grabbed the rear passenger door with both hands and braced one foot against the rear wheel.

"I finally grabbed the back door and with everything that I had pulled it open," Hull said. "It seemed like forever in my life, but the whole event probably took less than two minutes."

That allowed Stutz to pull Mrs. McCarthy from the car, which had begun sinking even faster.

"I swam over the hood to the front and opened the driver's-side door," Stutz said. "It sounds so odd -- swimming -- but that's what I was doing."

Stutz said he pulled the top part of Mrs. McCarthy's seat belt away from her and pulled her out through the bottom. He did not unbuckle her seat belt.

"There was no time for that," he said. "This was a fast-sinking car."

At the same time, the others were pulling Max McCarthy, a retired storekeeper from New York, to safety.

"We had to carry him out of the ditch," said Chaffin, who lives in Palm Harbor. "He didn't want to leave until his wife was out. . . . We got the people out just in time and then the water went completely over the car."

On Thursday, Mrs. McCarthy said the car was soaked but she and her husband were fine. A few minutes after baking a batch of cookies for her rescuers, she said she was profoundly grateful for their help.

"I felt that my guardian angel was with the (Team Savage) people," Mrs. McCarthy said. "If they hadn't seen or didn't know we were there we could have drowned very easily."

- Richard Danielson can be reached at (727) 445-4194 or danielson@sptimes.com. Researchers Caryn Baird and Kitty Bennett contributed to this report.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.