Firefighters rescue mom, kids from car filled with fumes

The car looked odd — stopped on the side of Clayburn Road, running, but apparently empty.

Driving across Abbotsford on Boxing Day night, Cathy Van-Martin and her wife Krista Harris saw what they assumed was an abandoned vehicle on a dark country road and decided to “call it in.”

Both women are first responders — Van-Martin, a captain with the Burnaby Fire Department, and Harris, a 16-year veteran of Abbotsford Fire Rescue Service. Although off-duty, they parked their car and approached the vehicle.

“We were trying to make sense of it,” recalled Van-Martin Saturday. “There seemed to be fumes, so we were trying to hold our breath a bit.”

The women didn’t realize there were people in the car until they put a flashlight to the window and saw two young children and an adult.

“We just immediately tried to get into the car,” said Van-Martin.

Their actions — and being in “the right place, at the right time,” in Van-Martin’s words — may have saved three lives.

The car’s doors were locked, so the firefighters smashed the front windows. Van-Martin turned off the ignition, while her wife grabbed the closest child from the back seat, a five-year-old, and laid the kid on the road.

Van-Martin held her breath as she crawled across the front seat to rescue the second child, a three-year-old. Harris pulled out the woman in the front seat.

Another passerby called emergency services and directed traffic as the women began performing “rescue breathing” on the two children, determined to be more vulnerable to the fumes.

Emergency crews were on scene in minutes, and the small family was taken to hospital by ambulance.

While they were initially listed in critical condition, the mother and five-year-old child were released from hospital Thursday, while the three-year-old is expected to be released this week, according to the Abbotsford Police.