Local resident and WBI Energy employee Ryan Muecke had just finished doing meter reads June 1 on a Lovell road when he saw a set of tires poking out of a ditch roughly 5 feet deep.

Muecke doesn’t know what caught his attention; he saw tires and thought “what in the world’s going on there,” he said.

He didn’t hesitate to pull over and when he made it down the ditch he saw a teenage boy trapped under a four-wheeler. The teenager was calm, Muecke said, and there was no sign of blood or burns. With the boy’s permission Muecke lifted the four wheeler and another truck stopped and helped pull the machine out of the ditch. In the meantime the teenager used Muecke’s phone to call family.

“I’m glad I was there to help, and that everything turned out OK. It could have been a lot worse if that ditch had been full of water or the tank had come loose and landed on him, or if fuel from the ATV had spilled,” Muecke said in a press release from MDU Resources.

When he left he filed a safety report with his company and what followed was a “sneaky thing” between his wife and his supervisor. 

Suddenly, the Muecke family couldn’t take their annual camping vacation unless it was near Burgess Junction — this way he could still attend an Aug. 3 safety meeting. Muecke had never been denied vacation before. His fellow employees were upset that he had to leave his vacation to go to a safety meeting, but when Muecke and his family arrived, he was given the Lifesaver Award from Liberty Mutual Insurance. Only 20 of Liberty Mutual’s thousands of clients are given this award each year.

“That was pretty amazing, [I] was pretty surprised,” Muecke said.