Rescued Mom: I'm Not a 'Miracle'
Grateful woman found in a ravine tries to get on with life.
Sept. 6, 2008 — -- Amber Pennell, 21, who was trapped in a wrecked truck for days in a ravine in North Carolina, doesn't consider herself special.
"I don't consider myself a miracle," she told ABC News. "I think it's a miracle that they kept looking and a miracle what they all did to help find me."
Two weeks later, she can only recall bits and pieces of the five days she spent trapped in her truck, which was found at the bottom of a ravine off Route 321 in Caldwell County, N.C.
"She remembers being down there. She just couldn't move. She remembers hearing the helicopters," Mitchell Pennell, Amber's husband, told ABC News.
Although the memories are few, Amber recalls drinking water to survive the ordeal.
"I would just sit there and wait -- what I thought was rain developing and reach out and get it and drink it," she said.
But Amber is quick to point out that it was more than the water that sustained her. It was also, she said, her love for her children: daughter Gracelyn, 3, and son Cameron, 1.
"My kids -- they are my life," she said. "They're every reason that I am alive, so I would have lived for them if for nothing else."
Amber left her waitressing job at Hannah's Bar-B-Que in Lenoir, N.C., shortly before 10 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 20. She lives about 20 miles away in rural Buffalo Cove, N.C., and the road connecting the two towns is surrounded by rough, steep terrain.
Amber stopped at Wal-Mart to pick up a birthday card and some household items. She called her husband to ask if he needed anything and left, according to the store's surveillance camera, at 10:14 p.m.
It was that stop, and a later one for gas, that led police to believe something had happened to her and that she hadn't simply skipped town.
Amber's husband reported her missing shortly after midnight, and by the next day the search was launched.
But five days into Amber's disappearance the search had been called off. However, Mitchell Pennell refused to give up hope. He went to Caldwell County Emergency Services director Tommy Courtner and asked him to continue the search.
