An elderly couple got more than they bargained for when they nipped out for some petrol last week. Heavy rain driving across the road picked up their car and washed it into a fast-running stream. “The car ended up being caught by a rock, practically submersed,” a spokesman for the fire department in Silvares, Fundão, told Correio da Manhã. “The two old people were up to their necks in water.”
Despite the horror, the couple was considered “very lucky”. “Another 300 metres and they would have been washed into the river Zêzere,” said the spokesman. “If they’d got there, it would have been very difficult to get them out”. Nonetheless, both the 78-year-old man and his 85-year-old partner were in states of shock when they were rescued from the Ribeira do Moinho in Silvares.
The woman was showing signs of hypothermia, and was taken to hospital, but has since been allowed home.
As the newspaper commented, “it was 30 minutes of panic” and in the end they never got to fill up with petrol.
