TSA agents recount fiery rescue
Aug 10, 2012, 10:39 AM | Updated: 12:14 pm
As James Bostwick drove his fellow TSA agents to Sea-Tac Airport early last Saturday morning on I-5, he suddenly saw a car come hurtling through the air. It smashed into a cement electrical box and burst into flames.
“After that I pulled over to the side of the road and turned around to look. The car was on fire in the engine compartment and I just jumped out of the car and raced towards it,” Bostwick says.
The crash in Federal Way pulled agent Jody Wellman, riding along with Bostwick, from a sound sleep.
“I woke up to massive braking in the vehicle, the sound of somebody making some kind of yelling and the sound of debris hitting the vehicle. The adrenaline just kicked in and I ran over there,” she says.
The 21-year-old driver and his 29-year-old female passenger were both hurt. The trio moved quick to pull them from the burning BMW.
Fellow agent Chris Hastings says the inferno was like a scene from a movie.
“It was pretty mangled. There wasn’t much left of it and what’s going through your head is ‘What am I going to see? What’s about to happen?'”
The State Patrol credits the three with saving the couple from potential disaster.
“What I was thinking was ‘There is one, if not more people in this car, it’s on fire. You don’t want that person trapped inside a burning car if you can help them out,” says Bostwick.
Wellman says the woman was seriously hurt and she stumbled several times as the flames ignited the grass around the car.
“We had to move her several times just so she could be safe with the heat and flames and everything. It was kind of dicey there for a few minutes,” she says.
All three are fairly unfazed by the rescue and insist they didn’t do anything special.
“I just feel that I did what I needed to do. We helped the situation, we got them the assistance they needed, and we came to work,” Hastings says.
