In the 5 days since Hurricane Helene made landfall on the southeastern coast of the U.S., over 120 people have died from the tremendous winds and flooding. Although the devastation has been tragic, there have also been beautiful acts of heroism to give us all a glimmer of hope in the wake of destruction.
On Friday, September 27, FOX Weather Meteorologist Bob Van Dillen was broadcasting from Peach Tree Creek in Atlanta, Georgia. He and his crew heard a woman screaming while doing a live TV set up in the pre-dawn hours. She had driven into a flooded area and her car was rapidly filling with water.
“I just put the microphone down and called 911,” he told Fox Weather. “I know that those guys are swamped, so we waited about five minutes. She was getting panicked a little bit more because the water was coming up a little bit higher.”
After realizing the emergency services probably wouldn’t make it in time. He took matters into his own hands and waded into the chest-deep water to help the woman escape her car. “She was in there, she was still strapped into her car and the water was actually rising and getting up into the car itself, so she was about, almost neck deep submerged in her own car,” Van DIllen later told FOX News.
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“She would have drowned,” host Janice Dean said.
“You know, I don’t know,” Van Dillen humbly replied. “I told her, ‘OK, undo your seatbelt,’ she undid her seatbelt. I said, ‘Let me have your phone, let me have your bags,’ then put [her] on my back and we walked in… she’s fine, she was in shock,” Van Dillen said. The 6-foot-1 weatherman then carried her back through the water to safety.
When the woman reached safety, Van Dillen gave her a warm shirt and put her in a car while she waited for a firetruck and her husband to arrive. When the husband arrived at the rescue scene, he hugged Van Dillen, shook his hand and thanked him repeatedly.
Van Dillen’s crew caught the heroic deed on tape, but the weatherman didn’t want to be the center of attention, so he kept trying to refocus the story on the storm’s devastation.
“Her husband picked her up, and she’s all good,” Van Dillen said. “But the story now turns not on me, but it turns to how much flooding we’ve seen. I mean … amazing amounts coming in.”
He even downplayed the bravery of his rescue. “You know how it is. I was concerned that one, maybe there was a nice swift current, but the current really wasn’t that bad. But, the water temperature I was afraid of, too. The water temperature is probably about 80 [degrees]. So, all of those things were working pretty nicely, so, that being said, the water came up to about my chest,” Van Dillen told Fox News.
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Initial reports showed that the first 3 days of the hurricane were the wettest in Atlanta in 104 years and a flash flood emergency warning was declared for the first time in the city’s history. George Governor Brian Kemp says that Helene’s damage will far exceed Hurricane Michael’s in 2018. “It has been unlike any other storm I think we’ve ever faced because of the size of the wind field that this storm brought through and how it literally is affecting 159 counties, not just 20 or 30 counties in south Georgia,” Kemp said according to Fox 5 Atlanta.
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