Drone rescues couple trapped Lochbuie sinkhole

BY OLIVIA YOUNG CBS 4

A miraculous rescue happened June 24 in morning east of Lochbuie. Two people were trapped upside down in a sinkhole as water lled their car. eir unexpected savior? A teenager with a drone hobby.

“I y down here all the time just looking,” said 18-year-old Josh Logue. Saturday morning, Logue ew his drone over a nearby Denver Hudson Canal, usually a dry creek bed, but due to recent rain, it’s a owing river. His dad and neighbor looked on.

Suddenly, he noticed a sinkhole where Weld County Road 2 crosses the canal, with something inside it.

“I said, ‘What is that?’ And I ew down over it and it’s a car in the hole,” said Logue. ey immediately got in their car and drove to the site. His neighbor, Ryan Nuanes, just so happens to be the assistant re chief at the Denver Fire Department. ey found a Jeep Cherokee with its horn going o , at least 6 feet down a massive sinkhole. e couple said they were submerged in water with only 6 inches of breathing room.

“I never expected this on my day o ,” said Nuanes.

“When I rst came down here, I wasn’t expecting someone to be in the car,” said Logue.

But then they heard voices.

“ ere ended up being two people, a man and a woman, that were trapped inside the car upside down,” said Nuanes.

“ e concern that I had, as a reghter, was that this river was gonna swell even more and it was going to then trap those people underwater,” said Nuanes. e couple was driving home to Keenesburg when the crash happened Saturday around 9:15 a.m., just 15 minutes before Logue spotted them on his drone, according to Colorado State Patrol.

Commerce City government as a city clerk for years until she had to retire at 70 years old.

Brighton Fire Rescue and the Adams County Sheri ’s O ce responded quickly, using Logue’s truck to pull the car up enough to free the couple.

“In my 25-year experience as a re ghter, this was the most real and most dire extrication that I’ve seen,” said Nuanes.

“If the water rose just a little bit more, it would have been a recovery, not a rescue,” said Nuanes.

Nuanes says the road was closed the night before because it was washed out elsewhere, meaning there would have been even less of a chance of the couple being found. e two people in the Jeep were taken to the hospital. e driver, a 66-year-old man, has serious injuries. But thanks to a teenager’s hobby, they’re both alive.

“It must have happened sometime between last night when they closed the road, and this morning when the car drove into it, that the sinkhole developed and nobody knew about it,” said Nuanes.

A photo taken by Nuanes shows the Jeep completely upside down and inside that sinkhole.

“A young man with the drone really saved some people’s lives, `cause you couldn’t see this vehicle except for an aerial shot,” said Nuanes.

Adams County crews began lling the hole Saturday, but they say it could take weeks before the road is safe to open again.

Brighton Police Chief Gilbert A Martin.

“He was my step dad and I called him dad,” she said. When Martin returned from Estes Park, she went to work for the

But Martin loved to stay busy and volunteered to work for the election commission until she was 90. She also kept busy helping her other daughter Debra Gutierrez with her nail and tanning salon, cleaning the beds and helping around the salon.

Gutierrez said her mom came to her salon and Gutierrez asked her what she was doing. Her Mom said “Whatever you want me to do.” And that’s how she started to help around the salon.

“I had to travel to Vegas to get certified to operate the tanning salon, and mom came with me, and she got certified,” Gutierrez said.

Johnson said her grandchildren are flying in for this event for her mom’s birthday party and have a granddaughter that lives in Fort Worth; she and her husband are flying in for this special occasion.

“She also is going to find out she has a grandson, who is now on his second day at work at the Commerce City Police Department,” Johnson said.

Sometimes we just have to laugh at ourselves, right? Or is it that sometimes we just have to laugh with ourselves?

I am not laughing am laughing with you kind of thinking as we look in the mirror. My laughing at myself moment came the other day while I was traveling. I had boarded my ight and was checking my email on my phone before we took o . As I tried loading my email app, it took about 8 seconds. And in those 8 seconds I became frustrated and thought why is this taking so long? Cue the laughing at myself.

Each year as technology advances our need for speed seems to advance with it. We want information and we want it now. We not only want it now, but we also expect the information to be fed to us before we even have to think about it, we train the technology to understand what we like and want before we ever even have to search for it, we simply turn on our device and lo and behold there it is waiting for us to consume it.

In a recent meeting with a partner, they were discussing how their technology could serve up information in real time, measuring response times in milliseconds. Again, we have become a culture that has a need for speed, instant grati cation.

As I came across a snail the other day, I watched it move slowly across the pavement. And I found myself fascinated by the slow and deliberate pace of the snail. I know it