Mother dives back into sinking car to save daughter

When her car slid and rolled, then plunged down a snowy bank, Ashley Holland remembers hoping that she and her daughter Macy, four, would somehow avoid landing in the dark, slushy water below.

The car came to rest, upside down, in exactly that predicament and her daughter was screaming: ‘‘Mum, I’m going to die!’’

Holland, 24, from Hantsport, Nova Scotia, then had another thought: ‘‘Just get her out.’’

The front and back passenger windows had smashed and water was surging in. Holland plunged out into the chill water and managed to prise open the back door but the pressure of water slammed it shut. The car was turning on to its side, raising the driver’s side skyward. ‘‘I had to dive in through the window,’’ she said.

The car was filling with water. Had her daughter been buckled behind the passenger-side door she would have been underwater at that point.

Crawling over the driver’s seat, Holland, who also had a 14-month-old daughter at home, got into the back where she and Macy unbuckled the five-point harness of the child seat.

‘‘I don’t even know how I got back out of the car with her,’’ she said.

‘‘I just somehow managed to crawl backwards through the window and get her out through the driver’s side window.’’

Holland carried Macy through the water, trying to hold her up so she did not get too wet.

‘‘It felt like minus 40,’’ she said.

By the time they got to the bank Holland’s legs were turning numb and she feared that she was going to pass out. But she heard a car coming and managed to push Macy up on to the bank, telling her to flag down the driver.

Meanwhile, firefighters on their way to a chimney fire had spotted something sticking out of the water and turned around. They were amazed to find mother and daughter safe, although suffering from hypothermia.

‘‘I just happened to look to my right and all I could see was a grey patch, which was the roof of the car,’’ Captain Ryan Richard told the Hants Journal. ‘‘It was only sticking out of the water maybe six inches. It’s absolutely a miracle.’’

Holland credited ‘‘parental instinct’’. She told CBC: ‘‘You do what you need to do to get your child to safety.’’

The pair had left home at about noon on Sunday to go to a children’s party. Eastern Canada was in the grip of a snowstorm, but Holland’s Toyota Corolla had snow tyres. She was travelling about 60kmh when the car skidded on black ice. –