Highway heroes: ‘Hand of God’ and Seabees reach out to rescue family - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Highway heroes: ‘Hand of God’ and Seabees reach out to rescue family

The Navy Seabees almost left the forklift behind. A broken trailer delayed them for hours. When they needed to stop to refuel, the rest of their convoy moved on. And now this — traffic backed up from the narrow bridge a few hundred feet ahead.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael McCracken could smell the thick black smoke of burning rubber and diesel fuel billowing up from the fiery wreckage nearly 100 feet below as he ran to find out what was going on.

“Is there anyone still alive?” he asked the California highway patrolman who was trying to get the U.S. 101 traffic under control after an 18-wheeler rear-ended a car a few minutes earlier and plummeted to the creek below, killing the driver.

The patrolman didn’t need to answer. McCracken could hear the terrified screams of a woman inside the mangled BMW teetering over the edge of the bridge. “My babies! My babies!”

McCracken, a heavy equipment operator with Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 3 out of Port Hueneme, Calif., was trying to get home to his own wife and kids Jan. 12 after a long pre-deployment training exercise at Fort Hunter Liggett.

“The car was literally teeter-tottering on the edge,” McCracken says. Firefighters were trying to free the woman and her two daughters, a 10-year-old and 10-week-old, “but every time they cut away a piece of the vehicle, it would slip even more.”

Amazingly, the Seabees had just the right piece of gear needed to lend a heavy-metal helping hand.

It took about two minutes to offload the SkyTrak forklift with a telescoping arm just long enough to reach across from the other side of the highway on an adjacent bridge. McCracken, a six-year Navy veteran, jumped into the driver’s seat and maneuvered the forklift into place so that he could cradle the car and keep it from slipping into the abyss.

As he held the car steady, the lift gave rescuers enough of a perch to get over to the driver’s side and free the mother and her two girls.

“It’s hard to describe all the things that had happened to put us in that situation,” McCracken says, noting that after it seemed like everything had been going wrong all day, suddenly “we were exactly at the right place at the right time.”

“I didn’t do anything that anyone else wouldn’t have done, but it was definitely God’s hand to have everything precisely there like that. I’ve never seen anything like it.”