Victim recalls terror after road collapse
LUCEDALE, Miss. – A teenager said she could hear the terrifying sounds of other vehicles crashing around – and on top of – the pickup truck where she and her mother were trapped after the truck plunged into a dark, muddy pit when a Mississippi highway collapsed during torrential rain brought by Hurricane Ida.
“I saw a black hole, then I blacked out and I woke up and my mom was leaned over toward me. She was choking on her blood and she couldn’t breathe or anything,” 16-year-old Emily Williams of Wiggins, Mississippi, told WLOX-TV in a video call from her hospital room.
Williams managed to sit her 39year-old mother, Amanda Williams, upright and stop her from choking. But, she said, she could still hear the chaos outside her family’s truck.
“I remember hearing a car coming and then I heard a crash and I heard an engine going from a car because it was on top of us,” Emily Williams said. “It didn’t really move us really much, but then I heard the screeching of another car’s tires. I heard people screaming and then it crashed.”
Two people were killed and nine were injured late on Aug. 30 when seven vehicles plunged, one after another, into a deep hole where a section of the two-lane Mississippi Highway 26 collapsed outside Lucedale.
Amanda Williams also remains hospitalized.
Layla Jamison of Lucedale, a 17year-old senior at George County High, was in the car that landed on the Williams’ truck. Emily’s aunt, Shanna Bordelon, said Layla’s car landed without crushing the cab where Emily and Amanda Williams sat.
Emily Williams said waiting in the collapse zone for help was terrifying.
“In all honesty, I was ready to give up,” she said. “I was like, ‘We’re not going to make it out of here. No one is going to find us. Everybody is just going to keep piling in.’ ”
Emily’s father arrived, and she said once she heard him screaming from above, she knew she would be rescued. She is recovering from a torn colon, a broken leg and other injuries. Still, she said: “I feel so lucky.”