Truck driver rescued from water
<p><strong>Emergency</strong> workers from Evergreen Fire Rescue use a backboard to help carry the driver of a pickup truck from a tributary of Spring Creek and up to a waiting ambulance on Monday afternoon in Evergreen. (Brenda Ahearn photo/Daily Inter Lake)</p>
An Evergreen man was saved by the quick actions of a neighbor Monday afternoon after his truck rolled down a bank at the edge of a mobile-home park and pinned him underwater.
Mark Getty said he was putting up a fence in his yard when he heard a loud splash from across the road at Forest River mobile home park. He and a neighbor ran across the road, where a white pickup truck was on its side, partially submerged in the stream that runs along the eastern side of the mobile-home park.
“His head was just barely above the water,” Getty said. “On the passenger side, the door was open part of the way, I got in and held his head up.”
Getty, 54, a retired truck driver and former scuba diver who currently works as a cook, said he tried to avoid moving the man as much as possible in case he had suffered a spinal injury.
Emergency responders from Evergreen Fire and Rescue arrived on the scene and pulled the man out.
“That’s all I could do — I was just praying they would get here soon, because I couldn’t hold him much longer,” Getty said, adding, “If me and my neighbor hadn’t been there, they’d be trying to resuscitate him right now.”
Montana Highway Patrol officers determined the man, Toby Webber, apparently had been drinking prior to driving his truck off the road and into the water.
Trooper Jason Fredenberg said Webber did not appear to have sustained any injuries.
By early Monday evening, Webber was still in the hospital. Fredenberg said he would be charged with driving under the influence.
Reporter Sam Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.