A woman who survived a grisly crash on an Ontario highway says it was a miracle she escaped alive after a tractor-trailer overturned and landed on top of her car.
Edyta Tobiasz was driving her silver Mazda SUV on Highway 403 near Oakville, Ont., on Monday when a tractor-trailer tipped over, trapping the car underneath it in a deep ditch beside the road.
"I think, thanks to God, I am alive. I thank God for my second life." Tobiasz told CTV Toronto on Tuesday as she recalled the nightmare. "It is a miracle."
Emergency crews rushed to the scene Monday afternoon to find the Mazda pancaked beneath the heavy truck, weighed down by 15,000 pounds of plastics it had been transporting.
"I feel scared and then I see the (trailer) fall down on my car. That is it," the woman recalled on Tuesday. "It was just a second. I didn't have time to do anything."
Tobiasz survived the initial crash and, for two hours, was stuck and unable to move more than a few inches. She managed to find her cell phone and called her husband to come to the scene.
"She called me, so I knew she was alive," husband Roland Tobiasz said on Tuesday. "The second time we spoke she was really, really petrified."
For two hours, rescue crews used a heavy tow truck to lift the truck high enough to help the woman escape, stacking wooden crates beneath it to keep the truck from collapsing again.
After the weight of the trailer was removed from the car, emergency responders used the Jaws of Life to remove the woman from her car.
Tobiasz was pulled from her car shortly before 5 p.m. and taken to an ambulance for assessment. The woman's husband met her at the scene and she was taken to hospital by helicopter.
By Tuesday, Edyta had returned home to Roland, grateful to have the chance to spend another day with her husband.
"Roland is my husband, but Roland is also my best friend," she said while tightly holding her husband's hand.
With files from CTV Toronto's Austin Delaney
