CNN Newsroom: Gov. Josh Green (D-HI) Talks About The Rescue After Seeing Car Crash
Interview
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Well, thank you. Aloha.
What happened was enormous crash occurred, just about a minute before we were there.
We were headed to an energy dedication, a big project and a car flown off the road and landed basically upside down facing the other way on the lava field. And this gentleman was suspended upside down in his seat, thank God, he had a seatbelt on because he would have definitely died otherwise.
And a good Samaritan had just jumped into the lava field. And I followed with a group of about five or six other people. And we were able to extract him from the car, and he did live. So we're just grateful and this was kind of what we call the aloha spirit. We try to help people whenever there's a problem.
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Yes. I came to Hawaii with the National Health Service Corps and interestingly, though I'm governor now and we live on Oahu, this is the area where I served. This is the area where my emergency department is and was. So a lot of the people probably in this picture were my patients over the years, not this guy. And this was an unusual circumstance, but thank goodness he was okay.
It really was an insane accident. There's lot of gasoline there in the field. So I give credit to the other guys who dove right in there. And our medics were just wonderful - we have a terrific team of paramedics and first responders here in Hawaii. They've just come through COVID. They were heroes for us and this was another example.
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Correct, right. So I think you guys recall, we had a volcanic eruption last year, Mauna Loa, which was quite something to behold. This is the other side of the island. So this lava field is like two or three decades old, so it's rough and cindery lava. And it's pretty - it's pretty tough.
I mean, that's actually a picture from an accident happened in 2019. So there was another accident right in front of us where a guy lost part of his scalp in a car accident, but we were the car behind him.
So this has happened a couple of times, but - look, we're all, like I said, here to help people and there's just a lot of stuff that happens in Hawaii, volcanic eruptions and car accidents, and tsunamis and all sorts of stuff. But come here because it's beautiful.
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I hope not. They're overly generous already. So this was - there's my - one of my security detailed pulling large boulders out from under the car. I mean, everyone really deserves credit for that more than me.
It's a small state so we jumped to, but we're honored to help people. And be careful when you're out here driving because there's beautiful things to look at and then the car flies by sometimes. But really we welcome people to Hawaii and this is just one of those unusual stories.
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Thank you.
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