2006_B_IC

‘An amazing moment’: Team drivers rescue
motorist from burning car
Most truck drivers spend the better part
of the year over the road. In the overall
calculations of the total minutes on the road, 36
minutes doesn’t seem very significant.
For Hirschbach Motor Lines Inc. drivers Ed
and Tracy Zimmerman — and one very lucky
motorist — on a late spring morning along a West
Virginia interstate, it only took 36 minutes for
several lives to be changed and one to be saved.
The Zimmermans, a team-driving married
couple from Kenesaw, Nebraska, wouldn’t
normally have been in West Virginia that day
in May 2019, the couple said, noting that the
route is one of the less traveled for them. Ed
was sleeping as Tracy took her turn at the wheel.
While traveling on Interstate 77 near Beckley,
West Virginia, the couple arrived on the scene
of a fiery crash.
Tracy stopped the truck, as another motorist
who had stopped to help, approached the
window, telling them that a man was stuck in
the burning car. Tracy woke Ed and they sprang
into action, grabbing their fire extinguisher,
and heading toward the car without a second
thought.
“When that man said that (someone) was still
trapped in the burning vehicle, I’m like, ‘We
gotta get him out,’” Ed said. “I don’t know how
yet. I haven’t seen it yet, but we gotta get him
out.”
The Zimmermans, with the help of the other
motorist who had stopped to assist, were able to
pry the car door open with a crowbar and pull
the man from the driver’s seat. Then, the driver
revealed that he had a firearm and ammunition
in the car.
“We all just kind of looked at each other like,
‘We gotta move, and now,’” Ed explained.
By this time, the small fire extinguisher from
the Zimmermans’ truck had been exhausted —
and it would likely never have completed the
job anyway. They grabbed the driver by the
waistband of his pants and pulled him 25 feet
or so farther from the car, just as a turnpike
courtesy vehicle arrived and parked between
the burning vehicle and the group.
“[The courtesy officer] got out of the car and
within just minutes, even seconds, you hear the
ammunition popping off, and then you hear this
big sizzle and a hiss,” Tracy shared. “And then
the explosion, as the car went flying in the air.”
Tracy said shortly thereafter the first
responders arrived on the scene and treated
the driver’s minor injuries, carried him to the
hospital, put out the fire and cleared the road.
The Zimmermans’ work was done, and they
climbed back into the truck and got back on
the road. When Tracy had parked the truck, she
never changed her ELD status. The clock had
been running, and showed that the incident had
only taken 36 minutes.
“I looked at that and I’m like, ‘36 minutes?’
It felt like we’d been there for two hours at
least,” Tracy said. “We just went into this weird
standstill and 36 minutes changed our lives,
changed that man’s life; we saved not just him,
but we saved his whole family.”
The Zimmermans later found that the police
report said the man had fallen asleep at the
wheel after working a late third shift. He was
headed to see his daughter for her birthday.
“So, we saved not just him, we saved his
entire family that day because it really could
have changed the course of their family,” Tracy
added. “That was just an amazing moment in
time.”
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