It was an emotional moment for a Saskatoon woman as she watched her car slowly winched out of the South Saskatchewan River Monday afternoon.
Almost seven months ago, Breanna Pegg was driving her vehicle when it hit a ridge of accumulated snow and ice and flew off the Circle Drive Bridge, plunging into the cold, dark water below.
Pegg escaped out of her sinking car by kicking out the windshield. She then pulled herself onto the ice and made it to the riverbank. She suffered only a broken clavicle but it's an incident she'll never shake.
“It’s just a feeling of triumph like I survived that,” said Pegg, who stood on top of the car’s hood in triumph after it was pulled out of the river. “I kicked my way out of that and it’s just so destroyed but here I am like whole and good.”
Her physiotherapy ended just days ago, and now she can look back on the incident.
“My entire life was being consumed by the pain and I was so mad about everything that happened to me and so mad I had to go through this pain and I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get better again.”
The car had been sitting at the bottom of river since the accident but environmental concerns prompted SGI to conduct the recovery operation.
“Our company was able to locate the vehicle after an extensive search," said Mike Steckhan of Shearwater Marine Services. “It was a little awkward because the car was already half covered with silt. Now that the river has slowed down (following the end of spring runoff) it started to deposit sand and the car was becoming its own sandbar.”
Following the December 2013 accident the City of Saskatoon removed the accumulation of snow and ice on the bridge and changed its protocol for snow removal on bridges. Pegg says she is in the preliminary stages of taking legal action against the city.
