Dehydration may have saved car crash victim

A 17-YEAR-old girl who survived eight days after her car crashed and tumbled 200 feet down a ravine may have been saved by her own dehydration, which prevented the expansion of a blood clot in her brain.

Laura Hatch’s family had almost given her up for dead, and sheriff’s deputies in Washington state had all but written her off as a runaway.

Then she was found, badly hurt and severely dehydrated, but alive and conscious, in the back seat of her crumpled Toyota Camry. A volunteer searcher, who said she had had several vivid dreams of a wooded area, found the wrecked car in the trees. “It’s an extraordinary tale of survival,” said King County sheriff’s Sergeant John Urquhart.