Divine Strength': Two Teenage Girls Lift 3,000 Pound Tractor Off Their Trapped Father

(Photo: KPTV)

We've all heard stories about someone lifting an impossibly heavy object to free a trapped loved one (or even a stranger) when time is short and no other help is present.

In Linn County, Oregon a man experienced his worst nightmare when he found himself in that exact scenario, trapped beneath his 3,000-pound 1949 tractor.

Jeff Smith says was trying to pull a stump out of his garden when he lost control of the machine, horrified when it flipped on top of him and pinned his chest to the ground.  He tried calling for help, but with each breath it got harder.

Thankfully, his 14-year-old daughter Haylee and 16-year-old daughter Hannah chose that moment to take their dog for a walk.  Seeing their father, they rushed over and attempted to dig out space beneath him for him to wriggle out.

"I can't dig fast enough and I'm freaking out," Haylee recalled. "I just cannot dig fast enough."

(Photo: KGW-TV)

Haylee and her sister frantically called 911, but knew that the response time in their rural area can be about twenty minutes.

They had to lift the tractor.

“I was saying, ‘God help me’ over and over because I obviously could not lift it myself," Haylee said.  "It was heavy."

Unbelievably, the two were able to lift the machine enough that their father was able to slide his chest to freedom, leaving only his arm pinned.  Soon after, a neighbor arrived with a tractor of his own, freeing Smith's arm.

"I don't know how I lifted it, it was just so heavy," Hannah added.  "And I could feel it, I could just feel all the weight.  But we just did it.  We both did."

“If these two hadn’t have been here to hear me..." Smith told the Albany Democrat-Herald. “They saved my life.”

KGW-TV has more on the story: