Mom, 2 Kids Survive Crazy Wreck With Oil Tanker

A family of three is lucky to be alive after being pinned under a large fuel tanker and dragged 200 yards before both vehicles finally came to a stop. Heather Slack was driving her two children home from a holiday trip in Utah—perhaps too quickly for the icy conditions, a highway patrolman says—when she changed lanes as the road curved and hit a patch of black ice. "It shot me across, and I don't know what happened," she tells Deseret News. "I didn't know I was under the truck, and I kind of thought I was falling off a cliff."

The car was pinned under a tanker, which was hauling 8,000 gallons of fuel, but pockets that Slack calls "little pods" formed as the car was crunching, protecting the three passengers. After gathering and hugging in an ambulance, the family walked away from the scene unscathed. "I've not seen one that's survived something like this," says a Unified Fire rep. "They're very fortunate." Slack, meanwhile, was full of praise for the first responders: "We live in such a wonderful world with emergency people that show up like this just for us," she tells KUTV. (Last year, a man survived not just a car crash but being trapped for almost a week.)