When an elderly Spring Lake woman’s house burned to the ground, it looked like she’d lost everything — including her prized 1965 Ford Mustang, recently restored and tucked away under a double tarp in the garage. But thanks to a community connection, a crane, and a crew that refused to quit, that car rolled out of the rubble very much alive.
Engineer and YouTuber Chris Boden had worked with Gelock — a Michigan-based heavy rigging and crane company — on past projects and knew what they were capable of. When a neighbor of the woman (who is in her 80s) reached out to Chris after the fire, wondering if anyone could recover the Mustang buried under the wreckage, he made one call. Gelock answered.
The team arrived to find total devastation: walls, floors, bed frames, and debris piled on top of the car. But when they cleared enough to take a look, they were surprised. “The damage that was done to it was not as bad as you would think, the way the rest of the building looked,” Dave Aris, one of the crew members recalled.
What followed was hours of methodical problem-solving. The team cribbed up the wreckage to take pressure off the car and built a stub wall for added support. Using a 12-foot 4×6 as a spreader beam and careful crane rigging, they lifted the debris just enough — about six inches of clearance — and rolled the Mustang straight out.
Then came the moment nobody expected. The restorer, who had completed his work just four or five years earlier, opened the hood, dropped in a battery, and the engine turned right over and started.
The car had been double-tarped, which shielded it from both fire damage and the enormous amount of water from the fire hoses — a small miracle inside a larger one. After roughly six hours on site, the Gelock crew had done what most people would have considered impossible.
The owner, who watched quietly from the yard the entire time, said very little — but her reaction when the tarp came off said everything.
Watch the full video on Chris Boden’s YouTube channel.
