A woman and her two school-age children suffered “extensive” injuries on Sunday evening after their vehicle crashed down an embankment and caught fire just east of Ralston.

The 36-year-old woman, her 9-year-old son and her 6-year-old daughter were all taken by ambulance to Powell Valley Hospital and then flown on to larger hospitals in neighboring states, said Trooper Kaycee Shroyer of the Wyoming Highway Patrol. Authorities were unsure of the occupants’ place of residence at press time, but Shroyer said it appeared the family members had recently been living in Billings.

The crash occurred a little before 5:30 p.m. on the south side of U.S. Highway 14A, near its intersection with Road 14. Shortly before the incident, a citizen contacted law enforcement to report that the vehicle “was going 90 mph with no headlights” as it traveled west toward Ralston, Shroyer said.

Not long after that, as the vehicle crossed the railroad tracks, it apparently went off the right-hand side of the highway, Shroyer said. The driver then overcorrected to the left, he said, which caused the vehicle “to go into a slide across all five lanes before it hit the curb and went airborne.”

It flew about 200 feet through the air, landed, rolled and “again went airborne and clipped an electric wire before landing on its wheels and becoming fully engulfed,” the trooper said.

The family members were eventually able to get out of the vehicle, Shroyer said, and the first Park County Sheriff’s deputy to arrive on scene helped pull the mother and son farther away from the flames. Members of the Powell Volunteer Fire Department extinguished the vehicle, which was a total loss.

The incident remained under investigation on Monday, with Shroyer saying that alcohol “is being investigated as a contributing factor.”