One motorist apparently pulled another to safety after crawling from his overturned car following a fiery two-vehicle crash outside of Battle Ground Monday afternoon.
Clark County Fire & Rescue spokesman Tim Dawdy said firefighters were called to the intersection at Northeast 50th Avenue and Northeast 239th Street just after 3:30 p.m.
The Clark County Sheriff’s Office said its preliminary investigation found a Dodge Caravan was heading east on 239th Street, and its driver failed to yield to a Ford Escape heading south. The two collided, causing the Ford Escape to roll and the Dodge Caravan to catch on fire.
Dawdy said the responding firefighters arrived to find a violent collision, with one of the vehicles, a minivan, on fire.
“It appeared that everyone was out of the vehicle,” Dawdy said. One person was seriously hurt, and another’s injuries were unclear.
The two patients, a 19-year-old man and a woman in her 50s, were taken to PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center for treatment, he said.
The sheriff’s office said the man and a witness helped pull the driver and sole occupant in the minivan to safety before the fire got to her.
Dawdy said the man told firefighters they reached through the minivan’s window to wrench its door open, then pulled the woman inside to safety.
“This is after he took himself out of a car that had rolled,” Dawdy said.
The Clark County Sheriff’s Office was investigating the crash. The response and investigation blocked the intersection for a time, Dawdy said, and Clark Public Utilities crews arrived to check for possible power line outages linked to the crash.
