FOX Weather meteorologist Bob Van Dillen is being praised as a hero after rescuing a woman from her car during a live shot as Hurricane Helene floodwaters rapidly rose.
FOX Weather meteorologist Bob Van Dillen is being praised as a hero after rescuing a woman from her car as Hurricane Helene floodwaters rapidly rose during a live shot outside Atlanta on Friday.
Van Dillen joined “Fox & Friends” to explain why he couldn’t sit around and wait for first responders to help when he saw a woman in danger as the deadly storm wreaked havoc.
“I know that we’re swamped here with all of the 911 calls, because there are so many high-water rescues that we’ve already documented so far… [she] called 911 and, five minutes, 10 minutes, and you could hear screaming, right? You could hear through my live shot, real loud” Van Dillen told Steve Doocy.
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“That’s her car right there,” Van Dillen added with a car that was almost completely submerged in the background. “So I just said, ‘You know what? I realize I’m with you guys on the air, but I can’t let it go.’”
The FOX Weather meteorologist “dropped everything” to help the woman get out of the situation safely.
“I took my wallet out of my pants, and I went in there, waded in, got chest deep,” Van Dillen said as he was told by Janice Dean not to be humble about the heroic effort.
“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 added.
“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.”
Dean then asked what would have happened if Van Dillen didn’t step up.
“She would have drowned,” Dean said.
“You know, I don’t know,” Van Dillen humbly said. “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.
“She was cold, shivering, so I gave her one of my shirts and she was in our car, just warming up, about 20 minutes later the fire department came, saw that we were OK and went on to the next rescue, wherever they’re going,” he continued. “Her husband just picked her up about five minutes ago.”
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“It was a good deed for the day,” Doocy said.
Helene made landfall about 10 miles west-southwest of Perry, Florida, at 11:10 p.m. ET Thursday, and impacts have been felt across the Southeast and into portions of the mid-Atlantic as the monster storm pushed farther inland and began to weaken.
While wind does remain a concern, the greatest threat from Helene continues to be the flash flooding as torrential rain falls across the region, sending rivers and streams out of their banks, onto roads and into communities, trapping residents.
The flash flood threat stretches from the Southeast into the mid-Atlantic, where multiple Flash Flood Emergencies were issued early Friday morning, including the first-ever Flash Flood Emergency issued for Atlanta.
FOX Weather contributed to this report.
