FOX Weather meteorologist rescues woman during live TV cross
The meteorologist was reporting on the “catastrophic” impacts of Hurricane Helene when he heard a woman screaming for help in the background.
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An American weather presenter who stopped a live cross to rescue a screaming woman from rising floodwaters has been praised for his heroic actions.
Fox Weather meteorologist Bob Van Dillen was broadcasting from Atlanta early Friday morning as Hurricane Helene triggered “historic and catastrophic” flash floods across the city.
While covering the storm’s aftermath, Van Dillen heard a woman’s desperate cries for help along Peach Tree Creek.
She had driven into floodwaters and was trapped in her car before sunrise.
“You’re good, you’re good,” he yelled over to the woman, assuring her authorities were on the way to rescue her.
After a brief pause, and as the woman’s cries for help became louder, Van Dillen decided to take matters into his own hands.
“I’m gonna go see if I can help this lady out a little bit more, you guys. I’ll be back,” he said.
Without hesitation, Van Dillen, a towering 6’1 man, waded into the chest-deep water, battling strong currents to reach the woman.
Dramatic live footage captured the moment he pulled her to safety, carrying her through the floodwaters to a nearby dry area.
He spoke to his FOX Weather colleagues half an hour after the incredible rescue effort.
“The water is like 80 degrees. It’s not cold, but I’m freezing right now,” Van Dillen said. “She was sitting in there by herself, strapped into her car. So I know she was cold.”
The brave meteorologist, who is a surfer and lives in the area, said the woman was “panicking” and “really wasn’t making too much sense.”
“She was still strapped into her – her car seat. She still had the seat buckle on. And she had her window about this much down and she’s trying to talk to me through that.”
Van Dillen said the water pressure was so strong the woman was unable to open her car door.
He told her to roll her window down, which sent more water flushing into the car but meant she was able to open the door and escape before going under.
“It’s up to my chest and there’s a little bit of a current, but she was a short lady too,” he continued.
“So she was probably about five feet. There’s no way she was going to be able to touch [the ground].”
While his selfless act of bravery did not go unnoticed, he remained humble, insisting that anyone in his position would have done the same thing.
“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.”
Earlier in the morning, high water rescues of dozens of people being pulled out of an apartment complex happened about a mile upstream from the scene of his rescue efforts.
Hurricane Helene’s deadly trail of destruction
Helene killed at least 17 people and caused massive flooding across the southeast United States on Friday, knocking out power for millions of customers.
Roads, homes and businesses were inundated after Helene made landfall near the Florida state capital Tallahassee overnight and surged north, though it weakened to a tropical storm.
The National Hurricane Center reported “historic and catastrophic flooding” and warned of flash floods in Georgia’s largest city Atlanta, as well as in South Carolina and North Carolina.
In Perry, near where Helene slammed into the coast as a powerful Category 4 hurricane, houses lost power and the gas station was flattened.
“Once the eye (of the storm) got to us, that’s when everything started to intensify,” Larry Bailey, 32, who sheltered in his small wooden home all night with his two nephews and sister, told AFP.
“I am Floridian, so I’m kind of used to it, but it was real scary at one point. It’s like, was my house gonna get blown away or not?”
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp reported 11 fatalities in his state, including an emergency responder, and he warned that the city of Valdosta had identified 115 heavily damaged structures with multiple people trapped inside.
Authorities in Pinellas County in Florida confirmed five storm-related deaths, and one person also died in Charlotte, North Carolina when a tree fell on a home, the fire department said.
Extreme weather across the world
With typhoon Yagi battering Asia, storm Boris drenching Europe, extreme flooding in the Sahel, September so far has been an unusually wet month around the world.
Scientists link some extreme weather events to human-caused global warming. “Helene traveled over exceptionally warm ocean waters in the Gulf of Mexico,” Andra Garner, a climate scientist at Rowan University in New Jersey, told AFP.
“It’s likely that those extra-warm ocean waters played a role in Helene’s rapid intensification.
“We also know that storm surges from hurricanes are getting worse because our sea levels are rising as we warm the planet.” Curtis Drafton, a search and rescue volunteer, 48, in Steinhatchee, Florida raised similar concerns on the ground as he tackled the storm’s aftermath.
“We have got to start wondering: is this the new normal? Is it going to happen every year?” he told AFP.
“We have a lot of talk about once-in-a-lifetime storm, but we had one similar last year.
“We had a 9-foot storm surge, two feet over my head plus a little bit more. This dock here got shredded.”
Some residents in Atlanta used buckets to empty water out of their ground-floor windows, while near Tampa in Florida, boats were left stranded in gardens.
More than 4.3 million homes and businesses were without power across Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, according to tracking site PowerOutage.us.
In the impact zone, residents had been warned of “unsurvivable” storm surge.
President Joe Biden and state authorities had urged people to heed official evacuation warnings before Helene hit, though some chose to stay in their homes to wait out the storm.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said Friday that work was underway to restore power and clear roads.
“In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Helene, hundreds of search and rescue missions were conducted by state personnel,” he told reporters.
“There are over 1,000,000 accounts without power in the state, but over a million have already been restored. Over 2,000 miles of roadway have been cleared, and these operations continue.”
With AFP, NY Post
Originally published as FOX Weather meteorologist rescues woman during live TV cross
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