By paNOW

Saskatoon survivor of river plunge recounts accident

Jan 8, 2014 | 12:21 AM

A Saskatoon woman said she is grateful to be alive after her car went off a bridge and plunged into the river below.

Breanna Pegg had been house sitting for friends in Martensville and the 23-year-old nurse decided to meet up with her cousin for lunch in Willowgrove. Pegg drove a route she had taken many times before but on Dec. 30 it ended with her and her car in the river.

“I honestly don’t even remember that beginning part at all… it’s all really fuzzy for me now,” said Pegg, recounting the moment she lost control driving on the Circle Drive North Bridge.

“I remember realizing my car was going over the barrier into the river. I remember just thinking ‘oh my god I’m going to die. I’m going into the river.’”

Pegg was travelling east on the bridge when she lost control . She said she doesn’t remember the drop from bridge to water at all.

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“When I first came to I remember thinking ‘oh I’m alive, I’m so relieved.’ I’m just so happy that I’m still alive because I thought I was going to die,” she said.

At that moment, survival instincts kicked in. First, she tried to open the power windows but they wouldn’t work. Then, she looked up and noticed that her windshield was shattered and there was a hole in the bottom corner.

“It was time to go for that hole in the windshield . It was so shattered it looked like I could just use my hands and literally break pieces of the windshield off and throw them away but it was still super firm,” she said, and added that she punched and hit the windshield but it didn’t crack.

“I started to kick the windshield. I propped myself in kind of the middle area so I could get a good angle. Legs are so much stronger than hands and I was wearing boots so it didn’t hurt the feet like it did the hands. So, I kicked the hole bigger and once it was big enough for me to crawl through, I went out.”

Once out of her car, the ordeal still was not over for Pegg. She first sat on the hood of her car then moved to the roof as it began to sink.

“I didn’t want to get into the water because you hear these stories of people who fall through the ice and die because they can’t pull themselves out of the water onto the ice,” she said.

“But then my car just sank, it went down Titanic-style.”

Pegg said she slowly lowered herself into the water and swam over to the edge of the ice where she was able to pull herself onto the ice.

“Going in, I knew it was going to be cold so I was knew that the water was going to suck and it was going to be really cold but it wasn’t really that bad. I guess the adrenaline was pumping,” she said.

“The coldest I got was when I was pulling myself on the ice.”

Once on the ice, the pain from her broken clavicle began to hit as well.

“I stayed on my stomach really flat to pull myself across the ice sheets. I just kept pulling myself along my stomach as much as I could towards the edge of the river,” she said.

“By the time I was just about to the edge that’s when people arrived… Once I saw them at the edge of the water I got up and walked the rest of the way to the edge of the water.”

Pegg said that she was grateful for all the help she received especially from concerned drivers on the bridge.

“I remember I heard voices from above me and it was a guy clearly on 911 or something,” she said.

” I just remember being super relieved because I didn’t think to bring my phone out with me.”

Pegg was brought to hospital to be treated and her car was left in the river where it will stay until spring.

She said that the one good thing to come from the accident was a public conversation about snow removal on the bridges.

“I think that’s awesome. I’m so glad that there’s not going to be any of those snow ramps around,” she said.

“I can’t tell you how much I would have rather just bounced off that barricade rather than go over into the river… I’m so glad the snow is gone. it even makes me feel better to drive across those bridges to see that they are clear and see that yes, that would stop a vehicle.”

With files from News Talk’s Kurtis Doering 

news@panow.com

On Twitter: @princealbertnow