Pat L. (who was actually just featured on DenverandMore earlier this month)  rescued a paraplegic man who falls from wheelchair, almost drowns.

This was is what Pat’s employer had to say:

The quick action of a Balfour Beatty Rail, Inc. craft employee at the Denver office may have saved a life. While driving down the street in the midst of a thunderstorm on Aug. 10, Patrick L., CDL groundsman for the West Corridor project, saw a man in an electric wheelchair take a spill over the curb, landing face-down in a puddle of water. Pat stopped the truck, pulled the man from the puddle and helped him back into the wheelchair.

“It scared me more than anything,” said Pat. “You don’t think about it, you just react. I did what anyone else would have done.”

He learned that the man was a paraplegic and could have drowned in the puddle, which he said was about eight inches deep. “He could barely keep his head up above it,” said Pat. “It got my heart racing a little when I saw it.”

After getting the man back in the chair and wiping the mud off his head, Pat offered to call an ambulance, but the man insisted he was fine.

Pat’s presence at that intersection was a chance occurrence, because he had missed his turn earlier and wouldn’t have been there to save the man if he’d made the correct turn. “Thank God, Pat missed his turn or this man could have drowned in the pool of water,” said Dan Danner, systems construction safety manager.

Way to step up and save the day!