It felt like time suddenly slowed down.
Ross Bradshaw, a gas control technician for Pacific Gas & Electric Company, was two hours into a four-hour drive back from training when he saw an orange cone flip into the air as he approached a construction zone in the curving two-lane mountain road.
Then, the classic Chevy truck that he’d been following for the last hour veered into a widening turn, left the marked road and struck a dirt incline. The truck did a half barrel roll, flinging a cloud of dust into the air, and landed upside down with a crash.
That’s when time seemed to impossibly speed up.
Bradshaw’s was the first car behind that driver—and as it turned out, his was the only car that stopped to help. “I ran over to see what I could do,” Bradshaw said. “And literally the moment I got there, the truck ignited.”
The occupant was laying on his belly, with one arm pinned and only about a 6- to 8-inch escape route left in the crushed cab. Bradshaw could smell that the man was drenched in fuel, and the heat from the burning truck was growing intense.
“I was pulling and pulling, and I couldn’t get him out,” Bradshaw said. “It was getting hotter, and I knew I was down to the last few seconds.”
Knowing that if he couldn’t extricate the man, he would have to leave him, Bradshaw desperately pulled the man’s stuck right arm up and behind his head, and somehow was able to dislodge him. The man slid forward a few inches, then a few more, and then they both were stumbling away from the truck as it was engulfed in flames.
A forest ranger, followed by the California Highway Patrol, stopped to help, and within an hour, the man was taken to the hospital by ambulance with minor injuries. In shock, he could only talk about the damage to his truck, Bradshaw said: “I don’t know he knew how close he was to being in a lifethreatening situation.”
Afterward, Bradshaw said, he was more critical of what he could have done differently. “I was just doing what I hope anyone would do for me or you or the next guy,” he said in a video recognizing him as a PG&E John A. Britton Award winner for acts of bravery (https://youtu.be/7kyYXt8hka4). “I’m not a hero.”
“PG&E wants you to be ready to act, giving you the education to not fix every situation but to handle what you can handle,” added Bradshaw, who has worked at the utility for nearly a decade. “I do honestly feel it’s ingrained into us, and I don’t feel I would be the only one who would act that way.”