Early Sunday morning, Oct. 25, Vanderbilt students Colin McClain, Dan Birmingham, Tyler Frazier and Drew Vankatraman were driving back to Vanderbilt from fall break in Myrtle Beach, S.C. They were traveling on Interstate 40 near the Tennessee state line about 2 a.m. when they came across a rockslide and saw what appeared to be a bad wreck. The boys stopped and found 73-year-old Lohvlohn Reynolds of Santa Rosa Beach, Fla., in her car.
Reynolds had been traveling from Charleston, S.C., to Chattanooga, Tenn., to visit her 18-month-old grandson. As she drove down the interstate, rocks, some as large as cars, began to fall onto the road. It became difficult for her to break because debris was getting trapped under her car. She tried to move off the road but it was impossible, and ultimately her car crashed into the rock wall. Shortly after the crash, McClain and his friends came upon Reynolds’s car.
McClain said, “It took us a while to realize the outlines in the dust were rocks. We thought it was just an accident at first.”
Birmingham, Frazier and Venkatraman helped Reynolds out of her car and back to theirs. They sat with her and kept her calm since she was shaken from the crash. Meanwhile, McClain called emergency services.
“We were in the middle of a national park, and I was the only one who had cell phone service. I called 911 while the others waited,” said McClain.
It was difficult for emergency personnel to reach the site of the rockslide because of its isolated location. McClain said, it took almost 45 minutes for EMS to reach them. They took over care of Reynolds, who suffered from bruising, burns from the airbags, cuts and a sprained ankle and wrist, according to the Citizen-Times in Asheville. She spent one night at Haywood Regional Medical Center in Haywood County, N.C., before traveling to her daughter's home in Chattanooga, where she is recovering.
Once Reynolds had left, the boys couldn’t leave right away. Since they were first to the site of the accident, cars had backed up behind them, unable to pass through. They were locked in from all sides. McClain said they were on the mountain for more than four hours before finally heading home.
“It was definitely interesting,” said McClain. “It was a situation that none of us had ever been in before.”
