PITTSBURGH — Nearly 30 EMS workers were honored Tuesday by the City of Pittsburgh for their work during a massive rescue effort after a car crashed off the Parkway East and crashed into the icy Monongahela River on Jan. 29.
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Gregory Tersine was the first diver in the water. He wasn’t working the river that day, so crews had to bring him his dive gear.
“My mission is finding this vehicle. I said, ‘I have to find this vehicle as soon as I can, I’ve got to extricate her,’” Tersine said.
He said it was difficult to see underwater, so he felt around and found the car within a minute. It was badly damaged.
“Luckily, I was able to kind of pry that door open enough and was able to remove the victim from the driver’s side there to get her to the surface as soon as possible,” Tersine said.
There was a moment of panic as Tersine worked to get to the surface.
“Due to the ice, when I came up, I came up on the bottom of the ice shelf, so I was now underneath the ice whenever I came up,” Tersine recalled. “It was a little bit of a panic for a second just trying to figure out which direction I needed to go, because when you’re under the ice, you really have no concept of which direction you need to go.”
The driver of the car, Jacinta Stevens, was rushed to the hospital but sadly didn’t survive.
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City leaders still wanted to recognize all of those efforts made to save her.
“You all today, who we are honoring, risked your lives to save another Pittsburgher, to save somebody that was in frigid conditions, and none of you hesitated, you didn’t think about it because this is the job you wanted to do,” Mayor Corey O’Connor said.
“This is the kind of stuff that we train for,” Tersine said. “Unfortunately, the results weren’t what we hoped for, but it’s nice that the city acknowledged all of the effort and everyone that put in their time and energy to do this.”
Stevens’ car is still in the Monongahela River.
Sources tell Channel 11’s Andrew Havranek the river is currently moving too fast to bring it out, but crews are working on a plan to bring it out of the water.
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