A TV episode about escaping a sinking car first aired on January 24, 2007. Sixty-nine days later, a mother in Minnesota is trapped inside one, holding her baby above the rising water. And the door will not move.
**January 24, 2007.**
Millions of viewers tune in to MythBusters for an episode called Underwater Car. Adam Savage climbs into an old sedan, the crew sends it into the water, and he sets out to answer a question most drivers never think about until it is too late: can you actually get out?
He tries the door at different stages of the sinking. Early on, it opens. But once the water outside climbs up against the windows, he cannot force it open at all, no matter how hard he shoves.
Only when the cabin has filled almost completely, and the pressure inside matches the pressure outside, does the door finally give.
Savage later said the underwater car shoots left him more panicked than anything else he filmed in 14 years on the show. His own mother, he admitted, is still not allowed to watch.
By early April, a Minnesota mother named Theresa Booth has seen that episode. She has no idea how soon she will need it.
**April 3, 2007. Saint Martin, Minnesota.**
It is early spring in the small town of Saint Martin, and the road still holds patches of slushy snow. Theresa is driving. Her baby daughter, Emily, is strapped in behind her.
The tires hit the slush. The car slides off the road and into the water.
Water starts pouring in, and it is coming fast.
**Inside the sinking car.**
She does not reach for her own door first. She crawls through the car into the back seat, unbuckles Emily from her car seat and pulls her daughter into her arms, lifting her as high as she can away from the water.
Then she reaches for the driver’s door.
It will not open.
She pushes again. Nothing. The water keeps rising around them, she has a baby in her arms, and the only way out she can see is being held shut by the sheer weight of the water pressing on the outside of the car.
This is the moment when most people panic, and nobody could blame them. Every instinct a parent has is screaming the same thing: push harder, kick, get out, do something.
Theresa remembers Adam Savage in that sedan instead.
She remembers that the door would not budge while the water outside was higher than the water inside, and that it opened once the car had filled and the pressure evened out. So she does the hardest thing a frightened mother can do with her child in her arms.
She waits.
She later said she did not want to. She waited anyway, while the water climbed, because she trusted what she had seen on a television show.
When the car has filled enough, she tries the door one more time.
She later said: “I pushed the door open and it opened like nothing.”
After all that, it simply swings open.
Theresa gets out, half swimming and half walking, holding Emily up over her head to keep her baby’s face out of the water. She keeps going until her feet find the road.
Mother and daughter both survive.
**Nine years later.**
MythBusters is ending. The finale airs on March 5, 2016, and it is followed by a reunion special that brings the old team back together: Adam Savage, Jamie Hyneman, Kari Byron, Tory Belleci and Grant Imahara.
For 14 years they were famous for explosions, crash tests and wild stunts. Now they sit and watch a short film about one mother.
**March 2016.**
On the screen, Theresa tells her story in her own words. The film cuts between her, clips from the 2007 episode, and the family going back to the spot where the car left the road.
The team is proud, and they are clearly shaken. Kari Byron wipes away tears.
Something they built for television, on an ordinary working day, had kept a little girl alive in Minnesota.
**February 2019.**
On NPR’s Fresh Air, Savage describes accidentally breathing in water during one of those underwater car shoots, and the line he forced himself to repeat while it happened: “Calm people live and tense people die.”
Seven words. It could be Theresa’s whole story.
**Today.**
There is a part of this story that matters even more now, and many people get it wrong.
Safety experts no longer teach waiting as the plan. Gordon Giesbrecht, a Canadian researcher who has run more than 150 car-sinking tests, says a car usually floats for about 60 seconds, and electric windows often still work for 30 to 60 seconds. That first minute is the window, in every sense.
His rule is short enough to teach a child: Seatbelts off. Windows open. Out, children first.
Waiting for the car to fill is a last resort, for when the windows cannot be opened or broken. It worked for Theresa that day. The window is still the first choice.
What she really proves is that a single calm thought, remembered at the right second, can outweigh all the panic in the world.
Is there something you learned from a teacher, a stranger or even a TV show that you have never forgotten?
Tonight, take one minute to tell the people you drive with about that first 60 seconds.
