Vermont lawmaker helps to rescue woman from a burning wreck
September 30, 2005
Associated Press----
NORTH TROY — Sen. Robert "Bobby" Starr and a fellow Vermont trucker helped rescue a Quebec woman from a burning car moments before it caught fire on a Canadian roadway.
Starr, 62, a Democrat from Troy, had just escaped from his own burning tractor-trailer, which had burst into flames after he crashed through a sudden and widening crevasse in the highway.
Starr was reluctant to tell the story at first, but television news programs in Quebec showed Starr and Matt Matthew after a steel culvert under a four-lane major highway collapsed at 11:15 a.m. on Sept. 14.
The collapse left a hole 30 to 40 feet wide across the highway. The cause of the collapse remains under investigation.
"I didn't do anything that any decent person wouldn't have done," Starr said. "I wouldn't have slept good if that lady had died."
Starr had been carrying a light cargo on Autoroute 40 from Quebec City toward Trois Rivieres. He was following a woman driving a subcompact car.
"All of a sudden I see her brake lights come on. I looked and the road had opened up right in front of her," Starr said. "I knew I couldn't stop for that hole."
The woman's car skidded left into and past the crevasse, and Starr drove by her, over a hole now 4 to 6 feet wide.
"It blew the front tires," he said. "The hole ripped the rear tractor wheels off."
Without wheels, the tractor's fuel tank hit the asphalt road surface and exploded. The back of the trailer dragged, jackknifing, as the burning rig slid along the guard rails.
Starr ran to the car where Anne Ayotte was trapped. The car had a crushed front end and Ayotte's feet were wedged under the dash.
Matthew, a trucker for Eastman Trucking of Newport Center, was the first trucker to pull up.
Together they jerked open the door and folded it back to free the woman's feet, carrying her to the grassy shoulder away from the flames.
Ayotte received serious injuries. Starr visited her last weekend in a Quebec hospital.
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