Pensioner rescued after her car plunged into Orrell Water Park lake

The 69-year-old, who couldn’t swim, managed to get out of the almost completely submerged vehicle and climb onto its roof after the accident at Orrell Water Park at 10am on Saturday November 11.

Emergency services rushed to the scene and under other circumstances the fire service’s water incident would have been mobilised.

But because it would have had to come all the way from Heywood and the woman was wet and dangerously cold, paramedics said she needed to be brought to shore as soon as possible.

So one of the Wigan firefighters donned water PPE and waded and swam out to the car which was 20 to 30m from shore and set up a line.

The distressed driver was then pulled back to land on the line, quickly wrapped up in warm blankets and treated in the back of the ambulance before being taken to Wigan Infirmary for further check-ups.

The fire crews never really saw the vehicle apart from the roof and didn’t know which way it was facing to know whether it had driven into the water frontwards or backwards.

Crew manager Simon Pheasant said: “The car park slopes down to the water but wev’ve no idea how it came to be in the water, nor how it got so far from shore.

"Our job was just to get the lady safely back onto dry land as quickly as possible because she was becoming hyopthermic."

Wigan Council was contacted to get someone to tow the vehicle out of the lake later.