Nurre family recovering after crash with paver

City Council candidate Steven Nurre is hospitalized following an Oct. 7 motor vehicle crash near Poolville, Texas but he plans to continue his campaign and will serve if elected, his wife, Brenda Nurre told the Enterprise.

“He still wants to run,” Mrs. Nurre said of the City Council race. “He still wants to serve. He understands if he ultimately can’t do it [because of his injuries] but he wants to run.”

Mr. Nurre and Kathy Muncy are running for former Councilmember Harrison Wellman’s unexpired term on the Nov. 5 ballot.

Mr. Nurre, his 21-year-old daughter Emberly Nurre and Emberly’s fiance Fenn Millea, 25, were all seriously injured in a pre-dawn collision between Mr. Nurre’s 2012 GMC pickup truck and an asphalt paver that had been unloaded by a construction crew and was blocking State Highway 199, Mrs. Nurre said.

Emberly Nurre was driving her father to the Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport when the accident occurred, Mrs. Nurre said.

Mr. Nurre, 54, was on his way to North Carolina to help with hurricane relief as a part of Team Rubicon, a veteran-led humanitarian crisis response organization, when the accident occurred on a blind curve, she said.

“They were unloading it in the dark, before dawn. There were no construction signs, no lights, no construction crews, and Emberly hit the [paver] head on,” she said. “The construction company decided to unload an asphalt paver in the middle of the road, blocking all lanes and she did not have time to stop.”

A car coming in the opposite direction also hit the asphalt paver, and the occupants were taken to hospitals, she said.

The Nurres and Mr. Millea were all wearing seat belts, a fact that emergency workers said caused serious internal injuries but also saved their lives, she said. Mr. Nurre and Mr. Millea had to be rescued from the vehicle by the jaws of life, and Emberly Nurre was flown to a hospital after cutting her father and fiance out of their seatbelts and assessing their injuries, she said.

All three had surgeries to stabilize broken bones and internal injuries, and Mr. Nurre and Mr. Millea face more surgeries and lengthy rehabilitation when they are released, she said. Emberly Nurre has been released from the hospital, she said.

Brenda Nurre asked the community for prayers and expressed gratitude “to everyone who has prayed and helped and for the top care received from all the fire, EMS, doctors and nurses and trauma and ICU teams.”