Woman Survives 8 Days In Hidden Car Wreck

Tanya Rider has been through hell – and she may be the luckiest woman in the world. The 33-year-old somehow managed to survive for eight long days, trapped and hidden in the wreckage of her own car, while police and her family desperately searched for her.

Rider’s story began on September 19th, when the Seattle-area woman failed to come home from her job at a local grocery store. She was driving her Honda Element along a wooded road, when she somehow lost control and the vehicle plunged down the embankment of a ravine and into a brushy area below. It couldn’t have happened in a worse spot – the place was virtually invisible from the highway and with her car entangled in a mass of twisted blackberry bushes and brush, it seemed as though she’d just disappeared from the face of the earth.

When she didn’t come home, her family called police, sparking the week-long search. But day after day, authorities failed to find any trace of her. And that’s when they decided to try something that only technology could make possible. They traced a very faint signal from her cell phone, which had somehow not only survived the impact but still had enough battery power left to stay on. The signal finally led authorities back to the cliff area on Thursday and when they took a second look at the spot they’d already scoured, they found the car and the woman inside it, severely injured – but still alive.

Crews were forced to cut into the roof of the vehicle to get her out. “She looks very pale, very dehydrated. She didn’t have a lot of cuts but had difficulty breathing,” explains State Patrol spokesman Jeff Merrill. Rider suffered kidney failure and sores from being trapped in the same position for more than a week. But she was able to respond to her own name when rescue crews finally found her.

While her family is grateful she’s been found, they’re still in agony. Her distraught husband says her condition remains grave and life threatening and she could lose her leg. Cops had been eyeing Tom Rider with extreme suspicion and were just explaining the intracacies of taking a polygraph test to him, when word came that his wife had been found. And there are new allegations that one of the police forces involved in the search originally refused to take the report because the woman ‘didn’t meet their criteria’ for a missing person.

There’s no word on what caused the accident.