A driver was saved from a submerged vehicle on Wednesday in New Orleans after Francine made landfall in Louisiana as a Category 1 hurricane. The drama unfolded on live television.
Perhaps it was fate that a man's pickup truck got trapped in rising floodwaters unleashed by Hurricane Francine not far from where Miles Crawford lives.
The 39-year-old off-duty emergency room nurse is professionally trained in saving lives — quickly — and that's exactly what he did the moment he saw what was happening Wednesday night in his New Orleans neighborhood.
Crawford grabbed a hammer from his house and ran to the underpass where the truck was stuck, wading through swirling waist-high water to reach the driver. When he got there, he saw that the water was already up to the man's head. There was no time to waste.
He told the driver to move to the back of the truck’s cab since the front end of the pickup was angled down in deeper water. Gripping the hammer, he smashed out the back window and pulled the man out, at one point grabbing him just as he began to fall into the rushing water.
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About 10 minutes later, the pickup was fully submerged.
Crawford, an ER nurse at University Medical Center, said he got out of the water as soon as the man was safe and never did get his name. Crawford cut his hand in the rescue — a TV station that filmed it showed him wearing a large bandage — but that was not a big deal for someone used to trauma.
“It’s just second nature, I guess, being a nurse, you just go in and get it done, right?” Crawford told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Thursday. “I just had to get him out of there.”
The National Hurricane Center downgraded Francine from a tropical storm to a tropical depression with maximum sustained winds of 35 mph (56 kph) as it churned north-northeast over Mississippi. The system was expected to continue weakening and become a post-tropical cyclone later Thursday before slowing down and moving over central and northern Mississippi through early Friday.
Power outages in Louisiana topped 390,000 early Thursday, according to the tracking site poweroutage.us, with an additional 46,000 outages reported in Mississippi.
The sixth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, Francine drew fuel from exceedingly warm Gulf of Mexico waters.
In addition to torrential rains, there was a lingering threat of spinoff tornadoes from the storm Thursday in Florida and Alabama.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said the National Guard would fan out to parishes affected by Francine. The Guard has food, water, nearly 400 high-water vehicles, about 100 boats and 50 helicopters to respond to the storm, including for search-and-rescue operations.
