Ward Trucking employee Dave Stuckey will be recognized as a “Highway Angel” by the company and the Truckload Carriers Association on Tuesday. Stuckey rescued a driver from a burning vehicle while on the job. Courtesy photo

Usually, when Dave Stuckey of Ward Trucking passes a vehicle that’s broken down but safely off the highway for something like a flat tire, he calls authorities to summon help and keeps going, because “you never know when you’re being set up.”

What he saw shortly after pulling out of his terminal near Pittsburgh in November in the middle of the night was different.

It was a car that had driven into an intersection and stopped, with what looked like steam coming from under the hood, followed by sparks, then fire — even as the driver, a young man, remained seated, as if stunned.

This time, Stuckey called 911, but didn’t leave — instead going over to the car with a hammer, in case he needed to smash a window, then opening the door to get the young man out.

It took persuasion, even though fire was beginning to come through the dashboard and the interior was filling with smoke: the man kept saying, over and over, “I need to go home.”

“You’re not going home,” Stuckey told him, as he unhooked the man’s seat belt and helped him out.

The car was engulfed in flames by the time Stuckey got the man to a police officer 30 feet back, who had just arrived in answer to Stuckey’s 911 call.

“I think he was in shock,” due to the fire, said Stuckey, an Altoona native living in Brackenridge who will be honored as a “Highway Angel” by the Truckload Carriers Association and Ward on Tuesday at the trucking firm’s headquarters in Altoona.

“I think it was just good timing,” Stuckey said in a phone interview Thursday. “Something that (anyone) should do.”

He didn’t think about it too much afterward, he said.

He left the man in the care of the police officer.

“I hate to think what would have happened to him,” Stuckey said. “It wouldn’t have been too long before he was toast.”

It gave him a good feeling, he said, when pressed.

“But that’s not why you should do it,” he said.

Ten years ago, he performed a similar service, Stuckey said, when asked whether the November experience was unique for him.

He was pulling into a terminal in Pittsburgh and discovered that another driver who had just pulled in had gotten out of his truck and passed out.

He was lying in the icy parking lot, while the temperature was about zero.

Stuckey asked a mechanic to bring a pickup truck around, helped the man get into the warm truck and waited with him until an ambulance arrived.

“It might have been sugar (diabetes),” Stuckey said. “He fell and hit his head, and it knocked him out.”

The man could have been run over, if another driver pulling in or out hadn’t been paying attention, Stuckey conceded.

Driving a truck is fun, although cellphone usage on the road has added to the stress, according to Stuckey.

Some drivers who seem to be texting pull up next to him and a little behind, so they can “use me as a guide” — watching his trailer out of the corner of their eye, he said.

When it happens, he slows down, “to get away from them,” he said.

His regular run is from the Pittsburgh terminal to one in Lorton, Va., where he meets a driver from North Carolina and they exchange trailers and return to their respective bases, he said.

That provides regularity and enables him to “go back to the house every day,” he said.

He listens to the radio and to audiobooks on finance and nutrition while driving.

People who work in offices ask him whether he gets bored.

“Believe it or not, there’s enough going on around you to keep you involved,” he said. “You’ve got to make decisions.”

He would get bored working in an office, he said.

Driving a truck may be “in my blood,” he said.

His father drove a coal truck at age 12 for his father, who had a coal and ice business, Stuckey said.

“It’s nice to be recognized,” Stuckey said of the upcoming award ceremony.

“We’re extremely proud of him,” said Ward spokesman Bill Bettwy. “That he would do something like that and not blow on by.”

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.