‘You can’t be scared to help people’: Man pulls two people from fiery wreck

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    COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa (KETV) — A man pulled two people from a fiery crash on Interstate 80 Tuesday morning.

Those people are recovering in the hospital.

Runk Wood says he’s not a hero, but just did what he had to do.

“You can’t be scared to help people,” Wood said.

He proved that, during his drive to work from Avoca, Iowa to Lincoln.

“As I got closer to it, I could tell that the car was burning. The fire got pretty big,” Wood said.

He saw the horrific scene near Interstate 80 and McPherson Avenue in Council Bluffs.

Council Bluffs Police say the car was stopped in the middle of the interstate when a truck hit it. The car hit a barricade and caught fire.

“A lot of people were driving by. I didn’t see a whole lot of brake lights, which kind of touches my heart, where we live in a society where you see a car burning in the median, you don’t stop,” Wood said.

But Wood did stop.

“I could hear the girl screaming and nobody was getting near the car and it was just a reaction of I’m not going to stand here and listen to somebody burn up in the car so I just went for it,” he said.

He says he pulled the driver to safety first.

“Got her about 20 feet away from the car. Then she was talking to me, I couldn’t understand what she was saying. But she kept pointing at the car,” Wood said.

That’s when he realized there was someone else in the car, so he rescued that person too.

“My hands are a little red. The right side of my face is a little tender from the heat, from the fire,” Wood said.

Wood is happy he was there to help but he insists: “I don’t want the hero title. I’m just a simple man that was headed to work and chose to stop and help somebody.”

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