Iowa Woman Says False Power Outage Alert Saved Her Life

The supposed power problem at Penny Lamar's Boone County home turned out to be something else entirely. The Iowa woman fell in a muddy driveway outside her rural barn-turned-condo on a quiet dirt road in mid-June, snapping her femur and becoming stranded, unable to sit up, as her blood sugar dropped, KCCI reports. Her husband was in Canada, and hours passed as she lay in the mud, fearing she wouldn't survive.

A Midland Power Cooperative crew eventually drove in after their system flagged a possible outage at the property—but instead of finding an electrical issue, they found Lamar. The crew called 911 and stayed until help arrived. "Our Lord works in mysterious ways," she says. Lamar, now recovering with rods and screws in her leg, credits the workers with saving her life and says power crews often "get very few atta boys" despite doing "a wonderful job."