THE RESCUE
The harrowing tale of the winter night 28-year-old Ashlyn Krell drowned in a freak car accident on Canada’s busiest highway, and of the police officers, firefighters, paramedics, medical staff and others who gave her back her life. Ashlyn doesn’t remember
Other police officers working in the area of London, Ont., that night knew something serious was going on just by the tone of OPP Const. Peter Reintjes’ voice over the radio. There had been a lot of chatter on the portables the evening of Feb. 12, 2017, with officers relaying back the status of the calls that had piled up since the temperatures had dropped and Highway 401 had iced up.
Reintjes — standing in the bitter cold near the Veterans Memorial Parkway exit with Tim Wiechers, the motorist who had seen Ashlyn Krell’s car go off the road — needed to find a clear channel to get help.
“Break, break, break!” he yelled, reverting back to his army-speak as a reservist with the Canadian Armed Forces and what he would say if he was in a war zone.
“Vehicle submerged. People are trapped inside.”
Down in the ditch, Ashlyn was trapped in a damaged car that was submerged upside down in a pool of open water. Her chances of rescue decreased with every tick of the clock.
“Send everybody!” Reintjes bellowed into the radio.
The officer knew his tone was elevated. “I was almost panicky because I knew we had a situation here … It was that feeling of helplessness.”
He wasn’t ready to give up, however. “I knew this was going to be crazy. I gave the radio transmission and made sure someone heard it, because I knew I was going for a swim.”
Reintjes pulled off his body armour vest that holds his radio and tossed it aside. He took off his gun belt and threw it into the back seat of the marked SUV.
Then he pulled open the back hatch to search for any tool that might help him. He opened the breaching kit. He threw aside the battering ram. It slid away along the ice at the side of the road.
He chose the pry bar and the “hooligan” tool, a device used to unlock car doors, thinking that maybe he could jimmy open one of the doors.
He handed Wiechers his flashlight and they ran down the ditch to the car. Reintjes jumped into the icy cold water. It was up to his armpits.
He was in for only a minute. There was no way he could get the doors open. There was only about 40 centimetres of space between the car and the culvert wall and not much more on the other side to the edge of the hole.
The officer was desperate to find an opening.
“I’m banging on (the car) just to let them know help is on the way, just to let them know, whoever’s in there, that help is here, have a little bit of hope.”
Reintjes hadn’t quite figured out which direction the car was facing and was confused because it was flipped upside down. But he could feel around the edges, and when he reached deep into the water, he knew that one of the windows was gone.
OPP Const. Emad Haidar pulled up to the crash scene just as Reintjes and Wiechers climbed back up to the highway after the first fruitless attempt to get in the car.
Reintjes pointed down the ditch to the four wheels of the car sticking up out of the water into the night. “There’s the car,” he said.
Without hesitation, and still wearing all his safety and communication gear, Haidar raced down the ditch and jumped into the chest-high water.
“You have to do something,” he said. “In this situation, when you know somebody is trapped, you don’t know what you can do. You have to try.”
With Wiechers still holding a flashlight, the officers started feeling around the outside of the car. Haidar was on the east side, where there wasn’t much damage, farthest from the culvert. It turned out to be the passenger side.
The doors wouldn’t budge. Reintjes was on the west side, closer to the culvert. Haidar saw a large piece of wood, likely part of the frame used to set the cement for the culvert extension, and jumped on it, floating over to the other side across the back. The rear window was broken and Haidar was able to reach in.
“I feel a coat. I know I’m grabbing someone’s jacket. And I start pulling any direction I could.
“But the car is upside down, so you’re pulling towards the floor, there’s nowhere to go. You’re not pushing down. Your instinct is to pull someone out of the water. You don’t think to push down into the water.”
Reintjes was trying to find any way in on the damaged side — the driver’s side — of the car. He grabbed the bottom of the door, close to the water’s surface, and could feel himself peeling it downward “like I’m opening a giant can of tuna.” He burned his leg on the exhaust pipe. Days later, his hands would still ache.
“And that’s when I got her foot. I’ve got her foot there.”
Whoever was in the car, he said, was wearing a little grey boot.
Ashlyn likely wouldn’t have known the officers were there.
The dirty water quickly poured into the car’s compartment once it landed upside down, submersing her in the icy-cold pool while she hung suspended in her seatbelt. Then, Ashlyn drowned. Within two minutes, if the force of the high-speed crash into the cement wall hadn’t already knocked her out, she’d be unconscious due to the lack of oxygen to her brain caused by the quick cooling of her body.
“You’re not cold and dead until you’re warm and dead,” is the mantra in cold-water research and medical interventions. That cold, mucky water, and the freezing weather conditions likely saved her life.
“You can survive a drowning in cold water more than you can survive a drowning in warm water,” said Gordon Giesbrecht, an internationally renowned physiologist who operates the Laboratory for Exercise and Environmental Medicine at the University of Manitoba.
The key, it appears, is the sudden and extreme cooling of the brain that will preserve body functions after oxygen is no longer available. Her brain went through something like a flash-freeze.
Giesbrecht, known as Professor Popsicle in the small worldwide community of coldwater researchers, has spent a career studying the effects of hypothermia on the human body. He’s tested his own body’s response to the cold by immersing himself in frigid water more than 40 times.
He ran for the Conservatives in the past federal election, but Giesbrecht’s most public claim to fame came in 2004 when he appeared in a stunt on the Late Show with David Letterman. Giesbrecht jumped into a deep tub of icy water outside New York City’s Ed Sullivan Theater and remained immersed for 17 minutes — all the while, explaining to the late-night talk show host how his body was reacting.
But submersion is different. Ashlyn’s body and head were under the cold water and drowning — asphyxia to the brain — was the result.
What happens to someone in cold water after that is only a theory. For obvious reasons, there are no clinical trials.
Giesbrecht said water in the lungs will effectively stop proper oxygen intake to the brain and the rest of the body. And, he said, a person doesn’t have to breathe in water to drown and often a reflex will cause a human airway to close up as protection, again stopping oxygen flow to the lungs.
Regardless of what cuts off the oxygen supply, the cold makes the difference. Humans have a normal corebody temperature of 36.5 to 37.5 C. On a warm summer day with a healthy body temperature, drowning in a swimming pool will occur in as few as three minutes underwater because the body will use up its oxygen very quickly.
If the brain is deprived of oxygen at a normal temperature but the person is revived, the chances of brain damage are substantial given chemical changes in the brain’s cells once oxygen is reintroduced.
Giesbrecht said the body’s response changes in cold conditions. “As the brain cools, its metabolism decreases and therefore its oxygen requirements decrease. If you have a given amount of oxygen, it will last longer.”
However, the survival odds are slim, he admitted.
Arriving on the crash scene, OPP Sgt. Perry Graham could see Reintjes beside the car, in the watery hole.
“He’s telling me to bring anything you got, so I grabbed a fire axe out of the trunk of the car and went down in there with those guys. I’ve been carting that fire axe around for the last 29 years and that’s the first time I’ve ever taken it out.”
Reintjes, after seeing the boot in the submerged car, was mistakenly convinced he was on the passenger side and believed at least two people were in the car. He and Haidar stayed in the water, hoping to get in, while Graham stood on top of it, waving the axe like a toothpick and smashing it into a rocker panel.
“Every time he hits with the axe, there’s sparks flying,” Reintjes said.
For the next few minutes, it was only the three of them. “Really, it was a helpless feeling,” Graham said.
“It was helpless and it was very quiet. But to stand around and do nothing? Couldn’t happen.”
Reintjes was still yelling at whoever was in the car to hang on. He remembers looking over at Haidar and both sighed in frustration. They knew time wasn’t on their side.
As grim as it was, they soldiered on as the wind blew colder and the sirens heading toward them echoed in the distance.
IT WAS HELPLESS AND IT WAS VERY QUIET. BUT TO STAND AROUND AND DO NOTHING? COULDN’T HAPPEN.
Arriving at the scene, OPP Sgt. Calum Rankin almost slid into Graham’s cruiser before he hustled out and looked down into the ditch.
For a moment it was hard to for him to process what he was seeing. The car was in a tight hole, upside down and in water. Graham swinging the axe. Reintjes and Haidar in water up to their chests.
“You have to imagine the scenario. Three of the largest people and strongest people I know are on the car and they can’t get in.
“For me, I was thinking — not to be disrespectful — that working hard isn’t working, so we have to start working smart.
“It became apparent to me within one or two seconds that what we need to do is get the car out of the water, because we’re not getting in any other way.”