Missing Person Mysteries !

A car accident on the south coast of New South Wales signals a danger that may account for some of thepeople who mysteriously disappear without a reasonable reason ever being found.  It is not unusual for someone to simply disappear without a trace and later we learn that their bank account has had no money movement.

It seems that a 67 year old woman was driving alone from Moruya to Wallaga Lake on the Princes Highway late at night when her car ran off the road.  It manages to leave the road without leaving a trace and crashed down a steep embankment, coming to rest upside down in a small creek.   The woman was knocked unconscious and lay trapped in the wreckage.  It was seventeen long hours before she regained conscience and became aware of her situation.  She was injured and unable to escape from the wreck.

Fortunately, she could access her mobile phone and called a relative.  Dazed and frightened, she had no idea where she was and when her relative raised the alarm that phone signal was the key to directing rescuers to the wreck.  Triangulation between several base stations pin pointed the location and police and ambulance crews were soon on the scene.

It was a difficult rescue. This driver needed to be cut out from the wreck and  there was a difficulty bringing the gurney back to road level, but she was taken to hospital and looks like making a full recovery.  This is an accident that could have ended with a missing person forever being an unsolved  case in the missing person files of the police service.

That wreck might have remained undiscovered - for years.  Even if road maintenance workers noticed a wreck in the bush they would tend to think it was an accident that had been covered by the police. It is unlikely that they would make that difficult climb down a steep cliff to investigate and hence the human remains might never be discovered.

It does raise an interesting question.  It is not unusual for the motoring public to notice a smashed car in a roadside paddock or the burned out shell of a car hidden away in roadside bush.  If we did not see that crash happen there is a tendency to assume it is old history and ignore it.  Sometimes these wrecks standing in plain sight can hold the fate of what become missing persons in the police network.

The mobile phone is a relatively new invention and this accident illustrates its value in bringing aid to a motorist in distress, provided that motorist is still alive and able to access the phone.   With the huge number of miles of road on this continent it is quite possible that a number of missing person mysteries may be masked by crashes that were never investigated.  It seems that it was sheer luck that this one on the south coast did not join that category.