-Photo by Hans Madsen A crew from Tolle Automotive, of Webter City, work on pulling a car out of the median Monday afternoon just west of Highway 69 on westbound U.S. Highway 20. Overnight snow turned the road into a sheet of ice.

JEWELL — On Clarence Smith’s first winter storm chase, he helped rescue a Webster City couple whose car went into a ditch.

“It was my first time doing winter weather,” said Smith, of Des Moines. He was on U.S. Highway 69 a mile or so south of Jewell when through the near white-out he spotted an Alliant Energy truck stopped near a car in the ditch.

In that car were a couple who had been headed for Ames and an important medical appointment on Friday.

It was not to be.

“It’s pretty intense right now. I don’t know if you can see the telephone wire shaking like crazy.” Smith narrated his live YouTube feed as he pulled up to help.

“We had probably arrived five minutes after it happened. We are both very lucky they didn’t hit one of us or anyone else,” Smith said.

The Alliant driver was the first on the scene.

“You think we should even try pulling them out with all this weather?” the worker said in a video published earlier by KCCI.

Smith said when they learned the vehicle in the ditch was rear-wheel drive they passed on that idea.

Plus, it was a blizzard and there was a tow ban in place.

The couple, whose names Smith didn’t catch, are in their 70s, he said. The husband is originally from the United Kingdom; the wife is originally from Jamaica.

Maybe a day earlier, Smith said, he’d taken his new storm chasing truck into Boone County to get a few wind readings. A steady 25 mph wind made for a -39 wind chill. For the few minutes it took him to take that reading, it took one of his pinkies two hours to stop tingling.

So he knew they needed to get the couple out of there.

“That wind felt like it was going to take your legs out from under you,” Smith said, adding that he weighs around 280.

The YouTube video shows Smith getting out of his truck.

They rescued the wife first.

“Thank you,” she said.

They pushed through the wind to go back for her husband.

“They were glad that we were both there, and the shock of it was still wearing off a little bit for them to wrap their head around it all,” Smith said in the KCCI video.

On a suggestion from the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office, Smith put the couple in his vehicle and drove them to the Casey’s in Jewell.

“I’m sure that’s not anything less than a traumatic experience,” Smith said about the stranded couple.

Smith, who works in IT for the Urbandale school system, grew up in the Waverly/Shellrock area. He started photographing clouds when he was in fifth grade. He’s been a storm chaser for 20 years.

The toughest thing he’s witnessed was the damage of the Parkersburg EF-5 tornado; “grain bins ripped in half, farmsteads just gone.”

And he recorded the Stratford to Jewell tornado on July 14, 2021.

He said his best advice regarding weather is don’t take chances.

“You can be here in Des Moines and have no idea a blizzard is going on, and you get a mile or two out of town, and it’s just white-out conditions.”