Photo above and below by Gerald Herbert, who helped rescue a car accident victim before he began shooting pictures.

The scene was chaos and panic: An SUV pinned against pine trees, its engine on fire, the driver trapped inside, moaning, crying and screaming.

It’s the kind of scene AP photographer and News Media Guild member Gerald Herbert would normally see through the lens of his camera, watching firefighters and medics do their life-saving work.

But on this day in August, there weren’t any emergency workers yet, just Herbert and other drivers who pulled off the Mississippi road in a desperate attempt to help. At that moment, picking up his cameras was the last thing on his mind.

Instead Herbert ran to the car and climbed through a back window. Moments earlier, other passersby had rescued the woman’s sister through the window.

“I could see that the steering wheel was pushed into her gut,” he said, describing the driver’s cries of pain and terror as flames shot from the engine. “I had this paralyzing feeling that there was no way to get her out, no way to put out the fire.”

Herbert climbed back out of the car and started shouting for fire extinguishers. A trucker came forward with a case of water, but Herbert knew that wouldn’t be nearly enough. He sprinted onto the highway, running faster than he had in years. His jeans were heavy with sweat from the Delta heat and humidity, but he knew there wasn’t a second to waste.

“I was running through the stopped cars yelling ‘fire extinguishers! She’s trapped!” he said. Most drivers looked back at him helplessly. About 100 yards up the road, he came to a tractor-trailer rig that had an extinguisher. He hollered for cars to move just enough so the truck driver could push through, while he kept running to search for more extinguishers. Ultimately, he ran at least half a mile, marshaling six trucks down the highway’s emergency lane. Running with one extinguisher himself, he jumped in a family’s SUV and asked them to get him up on the grass as close to the burning car as possible.

By the time he got there — just a few short minutes after he began his sprint — truckers were dousing flames with the fire extinguishers, aided by a cement truck that seemed to appear out of nowhere. The truck’s driver used a water hose to douse the trapped woman, protecting her from the fire.

Meanwhile, someone hooked a pick up truck’s tow rope to the car and pulled it out of the trees. The woman’s rescue was now assured. “You’re going from those feelings of horror and helplessness and paralysis to action, and then this incredible sense of relief and victory that this person is going to live,” Herbert said.

It was only then that he grabbed his cameras, wanting to document the heroism of so many people — maybe two dozen in all who stopped and played an active role in the rescue.

“I knew I was in the middle of something incredible, this incredibly heroic effort by all of these strangers,” he said. “No matter what they did, big or small, every one of them gave 110 percent.”

Herbert has been in touch with some of the other passersby, and he has contact information for the still-recovering driver. He hopes one day to visit her. He remembers kneeling next to her as she was lifted out of the car and laid on the grass, telling her, “It’s OK, everybody’s out, everyone’s OK.”

A career photojournalist, Herbert has worked for AP since 2003. The morning of the accident, he’d already covered the shooting of four police officers outside New Orleans and was on his way to Biloxi for a Civil War anniversary feature. His journalistic instincts are well honed, but he says there are moments when your instincts as a human being are the first to kick in.

“In this situation, there was no question that my efforts were needed to help rescue someone from imminent death,” he said. “This situation called for me to be a person first and a journalist second.”