Some brave bystanders in Auburn rescued a local woman from a convertible that was quickly sinking in frigid floodwaters by cutting through her roof with a screwdriver.

“Another minute and it would have been over,” said Paul Lynn, who provided the screwdriver.

Early in the afternoon of Monday, April 16, during some of the worst of the recent flooding that drenched the state, Fred Mcneill saw a gray Chrysler Sebring convertible being carried away in a pool of floodwater collected on Wilson’s Crossing Road, near the Londonderry Turnpike in Auburn.

Mcneill, a Manchester man who was in the area looking for an alternate route to pick his son up from Pinkerton Academy in Derry, noticed a woman in the driver’s seat as the car began to drift.

According to Union Leader reports, the driver of the car was Auburn’s Colette Deusinger.

“When I got there, I didn’t think it was going to be that grave a situation,” said Mcneill, who works for the city of Manchester in the environmental protection division.

But things quickly turned as the car’s front end began to capsize.

“It was like the Titanic,” said Lynn.

Mcneill yelled to onlookers to find a knife so he could cut through the roof. His 12-year-old son grabbed a pocket knife out of the glove compartment of Mcneill’s car, but was separated from the Sebring by too much surging water to deliver the tool.

Lynn, who owns nearby Turnpike Pizza, produced a screwdriver on the fly and made his way toward the scene. He had to avoid the deepest parts of the pool, which he guessed to be 7 or 8 feet deep.

“You couldn’t run, you couldn’t swim,” he said. “You just had to take these long strides.” He reached the car, overwhelmed with cold, emotion and adrenaline.

“It seemed like it took an hour, but it probably all happened in seconds,” he said. “All I could see was the panic in her eyes while I was going for the car.”

Lynn passed the screwdriver on to Mcneill, who then furiously ripped through the roof as the front end of the Sebring plunged further into the numbing pool.

“I was in a panic, and I was ripping and poking at that roof as much as I could,” Mcneill said. “It was definitely a grave situation. The water was filling up and she was trying to kick out the glass.”

Mcneill than gouged the roof open, and the two men yanked Deusinger out of the car and waited for safety officials to arrive while the Sebring sank even lower. Deusinger was sent to a nearby hospital, but was released later that day, Mcneill said.

Deusinger called Mcneill later that day to thank him. “Believe me,” he said. “Anyone would have done the same thing, I’m sure.”