Pickup truck recovered by tow company after plummeting off cliff on Hawai‘i Island

When Cole Prettyman stood on the rugged Kohala coastline looking at a pickup 50 feet below, stuck on rocks and being pummeled with high surf, he didn’t know if his tow trucks could recover it.

Prettyman, owner of Hook Me Up Towing, got the call for the unusual job at about 8 a.m. on Monday. The incident wasn’t reported to Hawai‘i Island police until a day after it happened.

The driver of a Chevrolet 1500 pickup, who was not identified, had been traveling on Sunday along a dirt road, about a mile from the highway, in an area known as the Kohala Lighthouse.

The driver was off-road on a trail when he missed a turn, “and the truck ran off the cliff,” Capt. Scott Kurashige of the Hawaiʻi Island police said Tuesday afternoon.

Somehow, the driver and his two dogs walked away from the accident uninjured, Kurashige said.

There will be no investigation by the police about the accident because it was not reported until a day after it occurred and there were no injuries.

This is the second tow job within a week that a Kona company has responded to a truck that ended up in the ocean. The first occurred on Aug. 26 when Jill Bianchini with Theo’s Towing showed up in a bikini after getting a call about a jack-knifed Ford F-150 underwater at Honokōhau Small Boat Harbor.

While Bianchini had to don snorkel gear and fins, and hold her breath to attach the chains to the submerged vehicle, she was able to single-handedly get it ready for a tow in about an hour.

The plunged truck was a much more difficult task, taking Prettyman and his four-person crew all morning to prepare for the job.

“We have a big fleet of tow trucks. The problem was we didn’t know which truck to take,” Prettyman said. “We were making sure we had enough chains, extra cables, food and water.”

Prettyman said they ended up driving to the site with three tow trucks, two that had Four Wheel Drive capabilities to be able to negotiate the narrow, rocky dirt road.

“Our tow trucks could barely fit to get to the site,” Prettyman said.

The third truck stayed by the highway. It was used for the transport.

The towing company arrived at the cliff at 1:15 p.m. Two men on the tow crew hiked down the steep, rocky trail to get to the vehicle. They hooked it up to cables that were lowered from two of the tow trucks.

Photos and video posted online show cables hooked to the front and back of the totaled Chevy.

The towing started at about 2 p.m. With wind pumping and dust kicking up in their faces, Prettyman said: “It took us five hours just to get it up the cliff.”

Prettyman said the truck kept getting caught on rocks as they were bringing it up. The crew and trucks also couldn’t get too close to the edge.

“We didn’t want to risk the ground collapsing under the weight,” he said.

And, a cable broke halfway through the job.

“We can’t panic and we worked past that,” Prettyman said.

The towing crew used 12 chains to get the truck back to the dirt road, measuring between 175 to 200 feet each.

“I’ve been in this industry for 20 plus years,” Prettyman said, “and that’s by far the craziest recovery I’ve done on the island.”