Video: Texas Cops Rescue Man From His Burning Car

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Car fires are one of the scariest things in the aftermath of a crash. Once things start shredding apart in a vehicle, especially the electrical and fuel systems, a blaze can ignite and spread rapidly. That’s exactly what happened in The Colony, a suburb of Dallas, Texas.

Learn how a water bottle can start a car fire.

Officers originally responded to a major car accident on a freeway overpass just after 1 am on July 19. When they arrived they found a car pinned between the median cement dividers. The Colony Police Department says those officers noticed the vehicle started catching fire, so they used extinguishers to put the blaze out.

However, the fire kept reigniting. That’s when one officer retrieved a breaching tool from his cruiser and used that to break one of the windows. After cutting the side curtain airbag using a knife, he pulled the man inside the vehicle out.

As he and other officers helped get the man away from the car, you can see in the included bodycam footage the fire spread rapidly. Had they left the man inside for a moment longer, there’s no telling if he would’ve survived or at least suffered extensive burns.

While the man was injured in the crash, police did rescue him from an even worse fate thanks to the quick thinking of the one officer. The department did say one of the officers at the scene had to be evaluated for smoke inhalation, but nobody was burned or even singed by the fire, so that’s pretty amazing.

This is the kind of protect and serve we like to see from police. We know the job is stressful and plenty of people treat cops like garbage because they got a ticket once or saw some story about police behaving badly. But when we see officers putting themselves in danger to help someone who’s in serious trouble we think that exemplifies what it means to be law enforcement.

Image via The Colony Police Department/Facebook

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