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MONTREAL — Emergency crews on Friday painstakingly cut free a 29-year-old driver of a hatchback car involved in a serious six-car accident on a highway leading into Montreal.

And the fact he survived, is a "miracle," said one fire department official.

The car was crumpled underneath the back of an eighteen-wheeler truck, pinned between the back wheel of one truck, and the crushed front bumper of another.

"I can't believe there is a car in between those two trucks. You can barely see it," said a man who didn't want to give his name.

It's believed a black pickup truck rammed into a cube van. An eighteen-wheeler tractor trailer then appeared to have rammed into the pickup truck. The Mazda3 crashed into the truck, and was then sandwiched by a second tractor trailer that rammed into it. A third truck — an eighteen-wheeler flatbed carrying an extending scissor lift on wheels — appeared to have tried to switch lanes at the last second, and hit the left corner of the second rig. It had a shattered windshield, and extensive damage to its front end.

The drivers of the first two tractor trailers suffered from shock and were treated in a hospital.

While they were being treated, it took firefighters two hours to saw through the barely accessible door of the Mazda3 and free its driver.

"He was conscious and oriented the whole time," said Gilles Ducharme, an operations chief with the Montreal fire department. "We had the jaws of life, and we called in our crew with heavy equipment. We also had a crane on standby just in case we had to lift one of the trucks."

When the driver emerged, he appeared only to have a cut on his head, and a fracture to his arm, but no life-threatening injuries.

"If that's all that happened to him, then it's a real miracle," Ducharme said.

Afterwards, the first truck was driven off the car, and there were no signs of the front end, and steering wheel. The dashboard had been damaged, and the windshield, and the top of the frame were folded up at the back of the car.

The accident caused gridlock for most of the day and forced closure of the highway for several hours.

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