MCKINNEY, Texas — The line of storms that pushed through North Texas Thursday night caught at least four semi-truck drivers in a very dangerous situation, knocking them on their side. Three were in the southbound lanes and one in the northbound lanes on I-75 between Laud Howell Pkwy and Bloomdale Road.
But the northbound driver had the narrowest of escapes.
"She was talking about the wind and she was scared, nervous which is highly understandable," said truck driver Mark Martin, who identified himself as the fiancé of fellow truck driver June Davis. He said he was on the phone with her when the crash happened.
"She was going from Irving to the Love's Truck stop about four more miles up the road," Martin said. "And all of a sudden she starts saying there are power lines going down and then she hollered and I heard all the crashing noises and then the phone went dead."
"What were you thinking at that point," WFAA's Kevin Reece asked him.
"Not the best," Martin replied.
The semi came to rest on its right side on a guardrail on the right shoulder of I-75. The guardrail pierced the cab of the truck, crushing everything in the cab except the driver's seat.
But Martin contacted WFAA because she did survive. Davis suffered minor injuries and spent a night in the hospital. Martin wanted to thank the rescuers who pulled Davis from the wreckage, lifting her straight up through the driver-side door.
"She was kind of hidden away in a very smashed portion of the cab," said McKinney firefighter/paramedic Nicholas Driver, who was part of a team of four firefighters and two McKinney Police officers who helped pull Davis from the wreckage. "We were very surprised that she was doing OK and that she was talking to us. I was very thrilled to see that she was OK."
Davis, who lost her phone in the wreckage Thursday night, is now resting at a McKinney area hotel, waiting for Martin to make a 700-mile drive to Texas to pick her up.
"Good Lord has his hand on her," he said when asked what he thought of her miraculous survival. "That's exactly what it was. Because when I seen that picture where that guardrail was on that truck, if I'd have seen that before I heard her voice, I'd have thought she died."
Thankfully, she is a welcome survivor story, from a frightening night on a windy north Texas highway.
The drivers in the other three semis that overturned in the southbound lanes also escaped with minor injuries.