As part of a brave rescue attempt, firefighters in Denver carried youngsters on their backs and shoulders as areas of the Mile High City were inundated by floodwaters.
The youngsters were among the 29 individuals who were rescued during the floods that happened in the city on Sunday evening after roughly three inches of rain poured in less than two hours. The rescuers hauled youngsters, often in pairs, out of the deep brown water and onto dry ground by wading through chest-high water.
Eli Espinoza told ABC News that they are waiting to be rescued while resting on their vehicle.
The firemen acted without hesitation. That is the essence of a great hero.’
A segment of the video shows a fireman carrying two youngsters on his shoulders while going backwards out of the water.
“Place them both on his shoulder,” suggested Espinoza. “Without hesitating, only walking back… And it was just a matter of instinct.’
A second fireman was pulling an infant from the vehicle.
The rescuers managed to keep the youngsters calm during the ordeal. Once everyone had been rescued, a member of the fire department brought pizza from his vehicle to the gathering.
‘He was like, ‘We have supper,” Espinoza added. And that was only a humorous prank. And it made everyone happy.
“The fire service is a tough profession,” said Lt. JD Chism of the Denver Fire Department. “There’s also a little of adrenaline flowing when you’re in that freezing water and ordered to remove those two children.”
‘Occasionally… you’ll see a youngster who is really peaceful,’ he remarked. And you are astonished by the circumstances. Occasionally, you will have a child who is frantic. Anyone who is a parent or has spent a significant amount of time with children is aware of the following: ‘The calmer we can be while we’re talking to them and the calmer we can be when we’re distracting them from the real events going place, the quicker we can get them to a safer setting.’ A handful of individuals were also rescued from automobiles stranded along I-70 and York Street by the rescuers.
There, 11 individuals, including three children, were taken to safety.
The Denver Fire Department received a total of 78 requests from persons in need of assistance, nine of whom were stuck in floods.
Lt. Chism also stated that it was not just department personnel that saved victims, but also citizens.
Amazingly, it wasn’t only these firemen who were affected. We have had many accounts of individuals assisting citizens and people assisting one another to safety,’ he added. ‘Therefore, there was a tremendous effort by the whole city of Denver to assist everyone in that atmosphere.’ Not just in Denver have floods caused destruction.
Last week, flash floods caused by excessive rains in Death Valley National Park, California, left 1,000 people trapped and smashed automobiles.
Near the Nevada-California state boundary, the Furnace Creek region of the park received 1.46 inches of rain, which park authorities characterized as “almost an entire year’s worth of rain in one morning.”
It has been called a once-in-a-millennium occurrence.
Daniel Berc, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Las Vegas, indicated that the tremendous rain that triggered the deadly floods in Death Valley was a once-in-a-millennium occurrence.
The probability of a once-in-a-thousand-years event happening in any given year is 0.1%, not once every thousand years.
The authorities also said that around 60 cars were submerged by the swift flooding and that 500 park tourists and 500 park employees were stranded.
The National Park Service said on Monday that the main entrance to Death Valley National Park would stay closed until next week as personnel continue to clean up after record-breaking rains damaged the roads and clogged it with mud, boulders, and debris.
The California Department of Transportation reported that over 30 miles of State Route 190 were partly or completely covered with debris, and that approximately 20 miles had been removed.
Caltrans said in a statement that the roadway would be closed until at least August 17 from Trona Wildrose Road/Panamint Valley Road to State Route 127 in Death Valley Junction.
Death Valley National Park, situated on the California-Nevada state boundary, features more than a thousand miles of roads spanning over three and a half million acres.
“As our employees continue to clear up debris. Director of Caltrans District 9 Ryan Dermody said that crews discovered a number of damaged stretches of roadway with missing shoulders, asphalt degradation, and roadway undercutting.
Caltrans said that some of the gathered material would be utilized to fill up eroding road shoulders.
On Monday, flash floods caused by a monsoon moisture storm forced the evacuation of the southern half of Joshua Tree National Region, another desert park roughly four hours’ drive south of Death Valley.
There were no injuries recorded.