A 26-year-old New Jersey native is being hailed as a hero for his part in saving at least 165 people from Friday’s devastating floods in Texas, most of them girls from Camp Mystic.
On Tuesday the number of missing surpassed 160 after authorities established a hotline for families to report people who were unaccounted for, Gov. Greg Abbott said in an afternoon press conference. The official death toll was 100, though likely to rise.
That toll might have been higher if not for the efforts of U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Scott Ruskan, a rescue swimmer who hails from Oxford Township in northwestern New Jersey’s Warren County and graduated from Rider University. Early Friday, an urgent appeal from a local search-and-rescue team in Kerr County, Task Force 1, launched the swimming school grad on his first mission.
The Coast Guard deployed his team from Air Station Corpus Christi around 6:30 or 7 a.m. that day, Ruskan recounted. Torrential flooding had trapped hundreds of people in Kerr County, Texas, after remnants of Tropical Storm Barry dumped a dozen or more inches of rain onto central Texas Hill Country — 6 to 20 inches throughout the weekend, according to CBS News.
The water cascaded into the Guadalupe River, which rose 26 feet in 45 minutes Friday morning, sending a wall of water through the campgrounds and youth camps along the river that were full of visitors for the holiday weekend.
Among the hardest hit was the private, Christian, all-girls Camp Mystic, which ultimately lost 27 campers and counselors. That is where Ruskan found himself after a harrowing seven- or eight-hour, 210-mile flight through the storm itself — a flight that would normally have taken an hour, he said.
“I’ve never seen anything this tragic in my life,” he told CNN of the view from above.
It took four approaches to land, and after they did, Ruskan stayed there as the only first responder while the rest of his team deployed elsewhere.
“I had about 200 kids mostly, all scared, terrified, cold, having probably the worst day of their life, and I just kind of needed to triage them, get them to higher-level care, and get them out of the flood zone,” Ruskan told “GMA,” with all of them “looking to someone for some sort of comfort or safety.”
Airlifting them out was the only option, so Army helicopters staged two landing zones at an archery field and a soccer field. Starting with the youngest children, Ruskan guided the stranded, traumatized campers and the occasional adult to the rescue helicopters, carrying some of the kids so they wouldn’t slip on rain-slicked rocks or cut their feet. Many of the children were barefoot because of their rush to escape the water.
“I was kind of the main guy as far as grabbing people, usually like 15 to 10 kids at a time, maybe one adult with them,” Ruskan told “GMA.”
Though the Department of Homeland Security lauded his actions, Ruskan downplayed his heroism, attributing his work to his training, and giving a lot of credit to his charges.
“The real heroes, I think, were the kids on the ground,” Ruskan said. “Those guys are heroic. They were dealing with some of the worst times of their lives, and they were staying strong, and that helped inspire me to get in there and help them out.”
With News Wire Services
