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NEW YORK (AP) – A man who drove off the road in this week’s snowstorm spent 10 hours trapped in his car after a plow passed and quickly accumulated snow buried him, reaching finally get a 911 call and be saved in no time. time by a New York State soldier.
Kevin Kresen, 58, of Candor, pulled off the road in the town of Olowo and was “hit by a truck,” state police said.
“If he had stayed in there for another hour, his body temperature would have gone down, and I am sure he would not have done so,” said the state police sergeant. Jason Cawley, who saved the man, said in an interview.
Kresen drove into a ditch around midnight and called 911 until the wee hours of Thursday, but struggled to connect. The vehicle became completely deactivated, authorities said, leaving Kresen without heat.
“He eventually made it through a couple of times and was geotagged, but not very well due to the lack of receiving accuracy,” Cawley said.
First responders reduced the call to a 3 mile (5 kilometer) stretch along the Susquehanna River in Owego, outside of Binghamton, which received more than 40 inches of snow in the storm. The storm blanketed Kresen’s Ford Fusion in snow and at least one plow passed while it remained trapped.
Cawley scaled miles of snowbanks, eventually passing over one that looked slightly different and was in front of a house. At first he thought he was looking at a row of mailboxes.
“I went in to find out what address I was at when I slammed into a car’s side window,” Cawley said. “I was a little shocked because I was almost standing over the car.”
The 22-year-old state police veteran removed the glass and asked if there was anyone inside.
“I’m inside the car and I can’t feel my feet,” Kresen told him.
“My heart skipped,” Cawley said. He dug out Kresen with the help of a passerby.
Kresen was suffering from hypothermia and frostbite and had gotten to the point where he had stopped shivering, Cawley said.
“It’s a really bad place when your body has stopped producing heat and stopped trying to warm up,” he said.
Kresen, whose speech was pesky, was helped to get into a marked police car and then driven to an ambulance, where he began to warm up.
“He was grateful to have been pulled,” said Cawley, who called the case “the first Arctic rescue.”
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