MERCER TWP — It took 80 minutes, but firefighters finally got a trapped driver out of her badly crumpled car that wrecked this morning in northern Butler County.

“She’s a very, very, very lucky young lady,” Doug Dick, paramedic and EMS chief for the Superior Ambulance Service, said of the 21-year-old driver from the Grove City area.

Kayla Thompson was on her way to work about 7:15 a.m. when she lost control of her four-door car on Browntown Road between Route 8 and Harmony Road in Mercer Township.

The car went off the road and rolled over, hitting a tree with its roof before landing on its wheels.

“The vehicle was crushed,” said chief Steve Bickel of the Harrisville Volunteer Fire Department.

Thompson, who was wearing a seat belt, was “heavily entrapped,” according to firefighters’ vernacular.

“The car was pretty much wrapped around her,” Dick said. The car’s air bags all deployed.

The severity of the crash sent firefighters from four departments to the scene. Harrisville, Marion Township and Slippery Rock in Butler County and the Pine Township Engine Company in Mercer County supplied the manpower.

The windshield was caved in and the steering wheel was bent into Thompson. The dashboard was all the way down on her hips and legs.

“She was conscious, alert and talking,” Dick said. But she was in a lot of pain.

The emergency crews toiled to free her from the wreckage.

Looking on were Thompson’s parents, from Harrisville, who were called about their daughter’s accident. They talked to her throughout the ordeal.

Thompson was flown to Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh with injuries Dick described as “moderate.”