‘Life and death’: Rescuers use tractors and a helicopter to reach people stranded in snow

A volunteer fire chief picked up a stranded, terminally ill man with his tractor and delivered him safely to a hospital.

A Kansas Highway Patrol helicopter rescued motorists stuck in the snow.

It all happened near Hope, Kansas, which got around 15 inches of snow during last weekend’s winter storm.

“It was life and death,” said Billy Lininger, who was on the way to the emergency room with his wife and son when they got stuck in the snow and called Dickinson Co. Fire District No. 2 Chief Chad Lorson. “My kid might not have made it if it wasn’t for Chad.”

Damion Lininger, who was diagnosed at 16 with stage 4 lung cancer and told he had four to five years to live, had chemotherapy on Friday and then developed an infection.

On Sunday, amid a blizzard, the infection started to spread rapidly, Billy Lininger said.

Their oncologist told them around 4:15 p.m. that Damion needed to get to an emergency room. The closest was Memorial Health System in Abilene, 28 miles north of Hope.

It would take hours for EMS to get to them because of the snow, he said.

The family hopped in their 2007 Jeep Wrangler, but even with the thick tires, the snow was too much.

They made it about five miles before getting stuck in a snowdrift about 2.5 to 3 feet deep, Billy Lininger said.

They called Lorson, their neighbor, for help.

Snow piling up

The fire chief had already had a busy day in the snow.

He had been headed home from the family farm west of town on Highway 4 in his pickup when he saw another truck stuck in the snow at the top of a hill.

Lorson grew up in Hope; he knew the top of that hill to be a problem with snowdrift.

Still, this storm was bad.

“Don’t recall having this much snow with this much wind, ever,” he said.

Lorson got out of his truck and waded to the other truck, driven by a neighboring farm hand who was headed back to town after checking on cattle.

The “closer I got, the deeper it got,” he said.

Lorson called his father, Phil Lorson, to bring a tractor and pull the truck back to town. Phil Lorson dug the truck out and started to pull before he left the road and got stuck.

The whiteout conditions made it hard to see where the road started and ended.

Chad Lorson, and his girlfriend, Heather Sill, got another tractor from the farm and went and pulled the truck back to town.

He had just made it home and took off his winter gear when the Lininger family told Sill they were stuck on Highway 43.

Lorson put his gear back on and headed out in the tractor.

He dug out the Jeep. Then, Stephanie Lininger got in the buddy seat in the tractor and Damion Lininger sat on her lap.

It took two hours in the tractor, but they made it to the hospital. Damion Lininger was admitted and put on intravenous antibiotics.

“Within a couple hours, they had him feeling better,” Billy Lininger said.

He said the staff at the hospital goes above and beyond for his son. Damion Lininger goes to the hospital weekly for lab work. The hospital donates to an annual fundraiser the family does and staff shows up when he races drag cars.

Billy Lininger got stuck again on the way home. Lorson got him unstuck and pulled him back to town.

“He’s a great guy. He goes above and beyond ... that’s why I called Chad. I knew he would do whatever he can to help us,” Billy Lininger said. “He knows if he needed it, he can call us. They are family.”

Damion Lininger was in the hospital for his 21st birthday on Monday while Lorson used his tractor for another rescue.

Another tractor rescue and helicopter rescues

The Kansas Highway Patrol called Lorson at 6:30 a.m. Monday about a semi driver stuck on Highway 4, just east of Hope.

“He had no heat in the truck, and his legs were starting to go numb,” Lorson said he was told.

He hopped in the tractor.

“I had to dig through snowdrift to get to this guy,” he said.

He dropped the man off at Agri Trails Co-op so he could go inside and warm up.

Meanwhile, the Kansas Highway Patrol used its helicopter in other rescues Monday on Highway 4 near Hope. They rescued someone stranded in a Nissan Sentra and a couple people each in two semis.

“One semi crew reported that they were going to run out of fuel soon and were concerned about freezing,” KHP Capt. Candice Breshears said in an email. “The highway was impassable, and ground units could not access the stranded vehicles … KHP used the helicopter to land next to the stranded motorists and transport them to nearby law enforcement.”

She said that, “best of our knowledge, KHP aircraft had never been used to rescue stranded motorists before.”

The helicopter, which is the only law enforcement helicopter in the state, is usually used more for “pursuits, surveillance, searches, search and rescue, and disaster assessment,” she said.

Getting unstuck, out of hospital

The Lorsons got their other tractor unstuck Wednesday, the same day Damion Lininger got released from the hospital.

On Thursday, Damion and Billy Lininger went across the street and shoveled Chad Lorson’s driveway.

Lininger said his son has good and bad days. He does chemo every three weeks and usually gets knocked down for the week after that but is up and about the next two weeks.

Damion Lininger is looking forward to this spring when he plans to build another vehicle to drag race.

The family created a GoFundMe in March 2023 to help with ongoing medical expenses. The fundraiser has reached less than a quarter of its $10,000 goal. It can be found at https://shorturl.at/kHSjA.

This story was originally published January 9, 2025 at 7:08 PM.