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“They said if we weren’t in that truck, we’d be dead,” she says simply. “Thankfully there was no oncoming traffic, and there was no traffic behind me, either.”

After Draves got her bearings, dangling by a seatbelt in the overturned truck, she helped her visually impaired sister to find her cellphone in the snow out the front passenger window.

Approximately 30 minutes later, by Draves’s estimate, the OPP and Renfrew County Paramedics arrived, but with a key response component missing, there wasn’t a lot responders could do.

Rescues requiring the Jaws of Life equipment in the tiny township about two hours west of Ottawa were covered under mutual aid agreements up until August 2015, when Head, Clara and Maria cancelled the deal with neighbouring Laurentian Hills Township over the annual $34,000 cost.

The victims were trapped in the vehicle.

“They couldn’t actually get in to us to assess us,” she says, “Because we were on our side and the roof had partially collapsed, and none of the doors would open, we were unable to get out. So they just had to ask us questions from outside the vehicle, and they handed in pillows and blankets and stuff so we could stay warm.”

In fact, Draves was suspended for another 45 minutes after the first responders arrived on scene until firefighters arrived from the Town of Mattawa, nearly 70 kilometres away.

“The firefighters ended up having to cut the windshield out so we could get out,” says Draves.

It wasn’t until several weeks later that Draves and her family learned why the rescue took as long as it did.