Aimee Beaudrot had hopes of getting to California. Instead, she spent Wednesday night trapped in her car that was stuck in a remote, icy and muddy Salt Lake canal.
Despite being very cold and trapped for as long as eight hours, she did not suffer severe hypothermia — to the amazement of emergency responders.
"She was in a lot better shape than she should have been," said Salt Lake City firefighter Dan Marlowe, who went into the cold water to rescue the woman.
The thought of getting to somewhere warm helped keep her alive, she said.
"Morning will come, I'll go to the hospital and they're going to get me warm," she said.
Beaudrot, 40, of Magna, said she finally felt warm while being wheeled out of LDS Hospital Wednesday night.
Authorities say she might have fared worse if not for the sharp eyes of Kevin Beckstead.
"Prayer works," she said.
Beckstead, who works for Questar, arrived at work near 1900 West and 800 South about 8:30 a.m. Questar is installing a pipe in that area.
He was surveying the construction site when he noticed a car about 1,000 feet away. It had broken through the ice and was partially submerged in a service canal.
"I thought the car had been abandoned ... maybe a stolen car someone had ditched there," he said.
But when he walked closer to check out the car, Beckstead said he was shocked when a woman's head popped out of the window.
"'Thank God,' is what she said," Beckstead said. "She said, 'I've been praying for help."'
Beaudrot was huddled in the back seat of her car. Water had filled her vehicle up to the edge of the back seat. She was wearing only a dress, a thin coat and no shoes.
Paramedics and rescue personnel were even more amazed to learn she may have been in the water since as early as midnight. The temperature early Wednesday dropped to 4 degrees.
"I was driving and the next thing was I woke up and I was in water," Beaudrot said. "It was coming in through the floorboards." She said she tried to get out but lost her shoes in the mud. She decided that staying in the car was better than being wet.
"It was muddy, it was cold and I just didn't want to deal with it," she said. She said that when she tried to open the door, she could see that the water would be up to her hips.
"I remember trucks passing on the road and I was calling hello to them but no one could hear me," she said.
Beaudrot, who fire officials say suffers from a pre-existing medical condition, was traveling north on I-215 when she drove off the shoulder for some unknown reason, down the 30-foot embankment, through a chain-link fence and into the canal. The car traveled an estimated 200 feet once it left the freeway and it hit the water with no signs of braking, according to the Utah Highway Patrol.
The UHP was investigating whether her medical condition caused Beaudrot to black out before going off the road. She had a handicap tag hanging from her rear-view mirror.
Both the driver and passenger doors were wedged in the thick mud of the canal. Her hood was crunched after hitting the far wall of the 9-foot-wide canal. Beaudrot said her cell phone was submerged in the water.
"She said she thought about trying to climb through the window but she had a broken foot," Beckstead said. Rescue personnel said they believed the broken foot was from a previous incident.
After the accident, she crawled into the back seat and used her jacket as a blanket and tried to keep warm with whatever she could find in the car. She said she tried to stay awake "because I thought if I decided to go to sleep, I might never wake up."
Beaudrot put her feet up to keep them dry. She said she was constantly moving them for fear they might have to be amputated.
When Beckstead found her, he said, he grabbed all the jackets, gloves and blankets he had in his truck and walked down the canal bank to hand them to her. She used two gloves for her feet. She told Beckstead that at one point she had been unconscious but she didn't know how long because she couldn't see her watch in the dark.
When asked if she was happy to see the sun come up, she said, "I was happier to see that guy."
Despite his sharp eyes, Beckstead doesn't consider himself a hero.
"I did what anyone else would have done. I was just trying to help," he said.
The Salt Lake City Fire Department's search and rescue team used three divers to construct a makeshift bridge from the canal bank to the car. She was carried out on a stretcher and taken to the hospital, where she was placed in a machine that slowly re-warmed her body. X-rays were taken, and she was given all the blankets she needed to keep warm.
"I'm going to try to get ahold of a friend and hopefully go out and get something to eat because I don't feel like fixing anything," she said.
Her trip to California, where it is a lot warmer than Utah, has been postponed.
E-mail: preavy@desnews.com; wleonard@desnews.com