New York man buried in his car in a snow-plow drift for 10 hours lucky to be alive

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Last week, Winter Storm Gail dumped multiple feet of snow across the North East, burying the landscape and wreaking havoc on roads.

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The storm claimed the lives of at least five people in the States, and another is lucky to be alive after a harrowing experience that found him trapped for hours in his car beneath feet of snow. 

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New York man buried in his car in a snow-plow drift for 10 hours lucky to be alive Back to video

Kevin Kresen, a 58-year-old from New York, was driving along State Route 17C around midnight in Owego, New York, about an hour-and-a-half south of Syracuse, when he lost control of his Ford Fusion and went off the road. After the crash, the vehicle was disabled and wouldn’t turn on.

Kresen called 911 from his mobile phone multiple times, but reception was spotty and they struggled to detect his exact location, according to the New York State Police report.

Things escalated quickly when a snowplow passed his stuck car, blanketing him in the white stuff and burying him and his car. The driver remained trapped inside of his vehicle for 10 hours without any heat or any way to signal his exact whereabouts.

It was State Police Sgt. Jason Cawley who finally discovered the location of Kresen, who was under a mound of snow. Cawley said the mound looked unusual compared to the others around it, so he dug and soon hit a window. 

“I was a little shocked because I was actually standing almost on top of the car,” Cawley told AP . 

Kresen was pulled from the vehicle and suffering from hypothermia having just spent the night in subzero temperatures inside of a snowball.