A MOTHER and young child had a remarkable escape yesterday when their car left the road and overturned in a field in Co Clare.
The single-vehicle crash occurred at about 12.30pm at Shallee about six kilometres from Ennis on the main N85 road to Lahinch.
The car appeared to go out of control before ploughing through a ditch and several small trees and narrowly missing a larger tree. The car careered down a 10ft embankment and stopped on its roof in a field.
The mother and young child were found trapped in the car but were assisted from the overturned vehicle by emergency crews. They were treated at the scene by paramedics before being removed to hospital for further assessment.
Their injuries were said to be “not serious”, although both were reported to be “very upset” by the crash. “It goes to show that seatbelts and child restraints can and do save lives, according to a paramedic. “They were lucky, all right . . . If it happened at night, the car mightn’t have been spotted at all,” the paramedic said.
Before the car could be removed from the scene, fire crews used chainsaws to clear several small trees through which the vehicle had crashed.
The drama was added to by some confusion about the site of the crash. While a passing ambulance crew discovered the upturned car, gardaí as well as ambulance and fire services received several mobile calls regarding a crash on the route.
However, the information about the location of the incident, provided by various callers, initially led emergency crews to believe there were as many as three separate car crashes.
Units of the fire brigade from Ennistymon searched for a crash on the Miltown Malbay road out of Inagh while crews from Ennis raced to a reported incident on the main road near Kilnamona.
Meanwhile, gardaí went in search of a reported accident closer to Ennistymon. On arrival at the scene at Shallee, emergency crews found a black Ford Focus on its roof in a field.
As other emergency crews searched for the other reported car crashes it emerged that all the callers were in fact reporting the same incident but were unsure of the precise location.
Traffic was reduced to one lane for a time before being closed for almost 90 minutes while crews dealt with the incident.