Joanne Brochu calls survival 'a miracle' after SUV plunges through ice

Joanne Brochu is crediting firefighters for a miraculous rescue after her SUV plunged through a makeshift ice road over the South Saskatchewan River at the Clarkboro Ferry on Friday evening.

"My first thought was, 'Oh my God, I'm headed down the river, nobody is ever going to find me,'" said the grandmother of four. "The current grabbed my vehicle and turned me downstream."

Brochu pulled out her phone and frantically tried calling 911. She had no service, and finally rolled down her window and climbed onto the roof, where Brochu got through and told the operator where she was. 

"I was sitting on my roof, I could hear the sirens right away, which was a great sound to hear," Brochu said. "I was very panicked."

"I want them to rescue me, but I don't want them to go under," she explained. "I was yelling to them, 'You can't come out here, you can't come out here, it's open water.'"

A matter of seconds

Moments later, Brochu's vehicle began to sink. The firefighters yelled at her to jump from her roof over one-and-a-half metres of open water to some nearby ice. 

"She herself was in imminent danger," Russ Austin, the deputy fire chief with the Warman fire department, told CBC News Monday. "It was going to come down to a matter of seconds. We didn't have time to formulate a complicated rescue plan."

She made the leap, just as her SUV sank into the water. From there she crawled toward her rescuers, completely unharmed — something she calls "a miracle."

"The Warman Fire Department, there isn't the words to express how thankful I am for them. I will never find the words to be able to tell them," she said. "They're truly heroes. They put their lives at stake. They saved mine and I'll be forever thankful."

Warman and Aberdeen, Sask., are separated by the South Saskatchewan River, and according to Warman Fire Rescue, in the winter a path is often graded across the ice so locals can cut down their travel time. About 50 people travel it every day. 

• Sask. Water Security Agency warns of thin ice, unusual conditions

• Woman rescued from sinking car on South Saskatchewan River near Warman

Brochu had noticed tire tracks approaching the water and spotted them going across the river as well. 

My first thought was, oh my God, I'm headed down the river, nobody is ever going to find me. — Joanne Brochu

"People were using it," she told CBC News Sunday. "I could see across with my lights and there were no barricades on either side."

Brochu got about three-quarters of the way across when she went through the ice into the frigid river.

Saskatchewan does not monitor unofficial routes across rivers. The area where Brochu's rescue took place now has barricades and signs showing the river crossing is closed.

"In areas where we do construct official ice roads, we test the thickness of the ice on a fairly regular basis," Doug Wakabayashi, a government spokesman, told CBC News. "These sort of ad hoc things where people are just doing it on their own, there is no ice testing, so no one really knows what the ice conditions are."