LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Louisville firefighter Bryce Carden has become an international hero after a daring rescue of a woman trapped in a semitruck dangling from the 2nd Street Bridge last week, but he said the credit goes to the team behind him. 

Carden talked about the ordeal Monday on WDRB Mornings. He said he and other fire crews were a little "behind the eight ball" when the first calls about the semitruck crash came in early Friday afternoon. "But we made it happen like we always do," he said.

Louisville Metro Police said officers responded just after noon to the bridge on a crash involving a semitruck, a pickup truck and two passenger vehicles. The crash caused the semitruck to break through the western barrier of the bridge and partially dangle over the Ohio River with the driver stuck in the cab of the truck.

Carden said he and other firefighters were in a local grocery store when they received the call. 

"We were at Kroger at 35th and Portland, and so we get the call and we had to hightail it back to quarters, get the rescue van, get rescue truck, and then figure out what we had," he said. "Guys were getting on scene, letting us know, and make a decision." 

Carden said they needed to decide if they would head for a boat on the river or to the bridge. They decided on the bridge and arrived by 12:06 p.m., according to the fire chief.

"We made the right choice, and I was the guy in the back of the rescue, so a lot of people have asked 'How did you know you were going to be the guy?' I was like at that point, we were so split up that I was the only guy in the back of the rescue."

"There's a lot of people in the fire department that are trained in high-angle rescue and dive in swift water, I just happened to be the guy at that time, and the right guy for the job, to get it done. So it was good," he said.

Carden said he was able to remain calm thanks to his training. 

"With all of the training and preparation the Louisville Fire Department provides us with, it almost becomes second nature when you get on a scene," he said. "You have to just slow it down. You hear big time athletes, they say you've got to slow the game down. Just like that. I had to slow it down. I had a mental checklist of things I had to do."

Dramatic video, which you can watch in full below, shows Carden pulling the woman back up to safety. She was in the truck — dangling over the water — for at least 45 minutes.

The driver of the big rig was trapped in the cab for nearly 45 minutes before being rescued by members of the Louisville Fire Department. 

"I was not nervous at all going over the edge because I knew they had me on the top side," Carden said after the recue Friday. "Once I reached her, she was super calm, collected and helped me do what I need to do to get her to safety."

"She was just praying. She was praying a lot. And I prayed with her. So it was good."

The driver of the semitruck, a Louisville resident, was taken to the hospital to make sure she was OK. She has since been discharged.

"I said, well she was praying, as I spoke on. She was saying 'thank God, thank God,' and I said here's what I need you to do, and she was, I've said, she was a veteran, so she was able to kind of go in that mindset of like alright, fight or flight, like this is what I need to do," Carden said Monday. "I took the harness, she assisted in taking it around her chest, it was a CMC rescue harness that we use, clipped it on, and then at that time I realized that she was tangled up in the seatbelt. And it's funny, I joke about this now, but we were given a free pocketknife by LG&E at a training last year, and I just happened to have that in my pocket, and I like, I remember it was like in slow motion, I like looked down and I saw the pocket knife in my pocket and I was like 'oh my God, this just saved the entire rescue.'"

"So I cut her out of the seatbelt, got her harness on her, and then as you can see, when she was coming out, she grabbed onto me so it kinda turned me sideways a little bit but I knew that, people were like 'were you scared?' And I was like, I didn't have a doubt. Like I did not have a doubt. I knew that there was guys below us that could get us if we fell, I knew there was guys up above that I trusted that would get it done."

The semitruck belonged to Sysco, a wholesale restaurant distributor. In a written statement Friday afternoon, the company said it's "enormously grateful" to the rescue team and law enforcement.

"We are thankful our Sysco colleague is safe and are happy to report she has been discharged from the hospital," a company spokesman said. "From all of us at Sysco, we want to send our deepest thanks, respect and admiration to the first responders and everyone on the bridge who aided in the rescue. To call them heroes feels like an understatement. Special thanks to Firefighter Bryce Carden for his courage, skill and steely nerves!"

Carden said he watched the rescue for the first time this weekend.

"It's been a whirlwind, but it's something that's bigger than us, you know, like it's a good time to have some positivity for once, you know we've had a lot of stuff going on in the city of Louisville, in the country itself, and the world, essentially, so it's good to have something positive and something successful happen that gives people a feel good story," he said.

Carden said he hasn't talked to the truck driver since the rescue. He said once she hit the bridge after the rescue Friday, she let go of the emotions and "took it all in." 

"It's been overwhelming. Overwhelming support. They (my family) just say that they're proud of me and I just keep reassuring everybody, I'm like, I played a small piece in a large puzzle, that's how I keep on putting it. Like a team that gets you to a championship and you hit the home run. You get the recognition but there's a lot that goes into it. I mean all the training hours that we do, that they provide us with, there's so much that played into this one moment that we were able to get it done, so it worked out good."

The crash shut down the bridge for more than 24 hours. The semitruck was cleared from the bridge by 9:30 p.m. Friday and engineers began investigating how much damage was done. The bridge partially reopened around 5 p.m. Saturday following those inspections. Engineers said the majority of the damage was done to the sidewalk, so drivers were allowed back on it.

The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet said Saturday crews inspected the bridge above and below the roadway deck, examined the structural steel and the damaged sidewalk, and all of the connecting supporting structure. The agency said the assessment confirmed that the bridge was safe for vehicular travel and the structural integrity of the bridge had not been compromised.

The far right southbound lane of the bridge remains closed. The left southbound lane and both northbound lanes of the bridge are open. But both sidewalks will remain closed to pedestrians until repairs have been completed. Traffic control devices were also placed in the closed lane of the bridge to allow for the other lanes to reopen.

KYTC said it has met with steel fabricators and a contractor to start on a plan to repair the bridge's sidewalk and railing. Securing everything at the crash site will determine when construction can start.

Two occupants of the passenger vehicles involved in the crash were taken to a local hospital with what LMPD calls "serious" and "life-threatening" injuries. As of Saturday evening, one person remained in the hospital, though their condition was not known. Everyone else involved had been released.

While there are no cameras on the bridge, officials said it was a chain-reaction crash and the semitruck did not cause the initial impact. The investigation into the crash remains ongoing and no charges have been filed. 

"There's so many different things that could happen, you know, but I mean, like I said, our training and we just had to trust each other. That's all it was, was trust and we got it done," Carden said Monday.

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