Pregnant paper carrier survives flood, finishes route

AMHERST — Patricia Tyree had just started her 80-paper route for The News & Advance about 4 a.m. Monday when she turned onto Wagon Trail Road off Buffalo Springs Turnpike in Pedlar Mills.

Tyree, 34, who has been a carrier for two years, has braved all manner of weather in the hills of western Amherst County. She is six months pregnant with twins and was about to have her first encounter with a flood.

“I always turn off of Buffalo Springs Turnpike” onto Wagon Trail Road, Tyree said. “Right there, there was water gushing off the bank (of a creek), and I kept going because I could see the road,” she said. She was driving a maroon 1992 Toyota four-wheel-drive pickup truck.

“It (wasn’t) even a half-mile, the water was in the road. I thought I could go through that, too.

“When I was going through there, it pushed the truck into a gully, the whole front end was under water,” she said. “The front end of it just sunk.”

She talked by cell phone with her boyfriend Joseph Lloyd Jr.’s mother, Kathleen Lloyd, who delivers a newspaper route in Madison Heights.

“I told her I had to get out because it had come up to the floorboard,” Tyree said. “I had to, I wasn’t going to sit in there.”

She put the transmission in park, turned off the ignition, left the lights on and climbed out of the truck, which was pointed straight down into the gully with water gushing by.

“I knew it was deep, but it (came) all the way up to my chest,” she said.

Wagon Trail Road, and the road she had turned off, and Buffalo Springs Turnpike, were being submerged by rising waters amid the nearly two inches of rain that fell in Amherst County. (More than five fell in nearby Nelson County.)

She walked behind the truck and onto a higher spot with grass, in pouring rain. “It was pushing me, but I was walking. I lost my shoes out there, old brown slip-ons. I was soaking wet.”

Meanwhile, Kathleen Lloyd had called 911. The Monelison Volunteer Fire and Rescue Department and the Pedlar Volunteer Fire Department arrived a short time later.

Tyree’s phone went dead after she waded away from the truck.

Kathleen Lloyd called her husband, who alerted his son, Tyree’s boyfriend.

“He was scared to death,” Tyree said, but had to stay home instead of going to see her because he was with her three other children — Ryleigh Nicole Lloyd, 14 months, Traman Lee Rogers, 7, and Logan Heath Rogers, 11.

The firefighters took her home by about 5 a.m., her normal arrival time anyway, but without her submerged pickup.

It was already mangled, she said.

“I smack deer, too. You’re always hitting something,” she said. “Lately — now watch me go out and hit one tonight — I have not hit one in six months. When I first started, I was hitting two or three a week, it was terrible.”

She hit the road again later Monday morning and finished her paper route, but with new stacks of newspapers because the ones in her pickup had been ruined. She had only delivered about five papers when the accident occurred.

Her boyfriend delivered some on Wagon Trail Road after the water had receded, before heading to his day job at the Virginia Department of Transportation.

Tyree planned to resume her route early today.

“Oh, yeah, I’m going,” she said. “I got a Toyota Four-Runner.”

But she will be more wary.

“(If there is) any water in the road, I ain’t going through it anymore,” she said. “That’s it, I learned my lesson on this one.”

Marshall is managing editor for the Amherst New Era-Progress.