A year ago this spring, a New Westminster woman and a Burnaby man met under unusual circumstances in the Kootenays – on the undercarriage of a 2007 Toyota Matrix flipped upside down in an icy, swift-flowing creek.
Frank Barbosa was unconscious, his lungs filled with water; Lisa Collyer was scooping water and mucus out of his mouth and nose, and yelling for him to stay with her.
The pair met again this week under happier circumstances in downtown New West, with Collyer accepting a St. John Ambulance life-saving award for her actions that day, and Barbosa – a husband and father of two – alive, conscious, and there to show his gratitude.
Their first meeting was April 20, 2013.
Collyer, a Douglas College hotel management student, was on her way from New West to Rossland on a sunny spring day to work at a hotel for the summer.
Twenty minutes outside Christina Lake, she drove around a bend on Highway 3B and saw a group of people clustered by the side of the road, looking down a steep embankment.
She stopped and saw a vehicle flipped upside down in the creek below, one man lying lifeless on its undercarriage with another man trying to provide first aid while yet another man splashed around in the icy water, trying to see if anyone else was trapped inside.
Minutes before, Barbosa had been driving his Matrix in the opposite direction, back to Burnaby, when he hit a patch of gravel coming around a sharp curve.
The Matrix had skidded out of control and tumbled down the 20-foot embankment.
“Then all I remember was hearing a lot of noise, a lot of brush in front of me,” he said.
He blacked out briefly, he said, and when he came to he was trapped upside down in his seatbelt, his squashed vehicle filling with water.
“I could feel the water in my lungs,” he said. “My head was fully immersed.”
He was sure no one had seen him crash into the creek, and even if someone had, he didn’t think he stood much of a chance of being rescued.
“I just thought, ‘This is it,’” he said. “I didn’t really panic much. I just made my peace with God and accepted it. And the next thing I remember was being on top of the highway.”
Months after the crash, other vague memories would come back to him as well: a woman’s voice asking about his family, a woman holding his hand.
Someone had seen him tumble off the embankment.
Nelson resident Mike Henderson and Albertan Steve Vandervelden – two strangers in two separate cars – stopped, slid down the steep bank and jumped into the frigid, chest-high water.
Unable to open any of the doors, they smashed a window, and Vandervelden dove in, cut Barbosa loose and pulled him out.
But neither man knew CPR, according to Collyer.
By the time she arrived, they had turned the unconscious Barbosa on his side on the undercarriage of the Matrix after giving him a few “chest thumps” (the phrase used by one of the men in police reports) with help from an off-duty nurse shouting instructions from the top of the embankment.
Collyer soon slid down the bank and stepped into the fast-flowing creek to help.
“I had to climb down quite a steep embankment to get to him – and as I was stepping my first foot into the river, my brain kind of said, ‘Should I really be doing this?’ Then you just think, ‘Forget it; there’s someone here who needs my help.’”
Soon she was on the undercarriage of the Matrix with Barbosa, while Henderson and Vandervelden searched the submerged car for passengers.
“He was blue; he had lots of water in his lungs,” Collyer said of Barbosa. “He had a lot of bile and sludge coming out, so what I really did was clear his airways. I could, at that point, feel a very slight pulse.”
She stayed with him for more han 40 minutes before emergency crews arrived, she said.
“The undercarriage was maybe three inches above the water line. I pretty much had to lie on top of the guy to hold him down once he started to regain consciousness. He started freaking out.”
They talked of God and his family, Collyer said, but Barbosa remembers little of those 40 minutes.
“I remember being really cold and shaking,” he said.
When emergency crews arrived, the three who had helped to save Barbosa’s life, were told brusquely to stay out of the way – an action Grand Forks RCMP Staff Sgt. Jim Harrison called an “unfortunate miscommunication.”
“The ambulance person probably didn’t appreciate how great their involvement was in saving this person,” he told The Record.
All three left the scene without emergency personnel approaching them for an account of what had happened.
“It was all very surreal,” Collyer said. “By the time I got to Rossland, which is about a half-hour drive from there, I actually started to cry.”
But police would soon track down Collyer and the two men, and all three have since been recommended by Harrison for a Commanding Officer’s Commendation for Bravery from the RCMP.
“It was just a team effort by a bunch of people that, out of the goodness of their heart, stopped to save him,” Harrison said. “It a was a very selfless act on the part of all three. We’re talking spring runoff. It was an extremely fast and deep creek running through there and very, very cold.”
Back in New Westminster, meanwhile, Collyer was presented Monday evening with a life-saving certificate and commended for her “selfless actions, teamwork and for her knowledge and use of first aid in saving a life” by the local chapter of St. John Ambulance.
Barbosa was on hand to cheer her on.
In the end, after Christina Lake Fire Rescue winched him from the creek more than a year ago and sent him off in an ambulance, Barbosa spent only three nights in hospital with a cut on his head and some water in his lungs that took about a month to clear completely.
“It just wasn’t his time,” Collyer said.
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