Speaking during an interview in late August, Fox Weather meteorologist Bob Van Dillen recounted back when, during his reporting on Hurricane Helene, he personally rushed to rescue a woman who was stranded and needed help at a time when 911 was swamped responding to other cases of imminent danger.
As background, the incident occurred in Atlanta in late September of 2024, when Van Dillen was covering Hurricane Helene’s crashing into the city and swamping it with buckets of rain and powerful winds. Though the major southern metropolis is well inland, Helene caused immense flooding damage in Atlanta, and Van Dillen was there as the streets flooded and buildings were swamped.
During the incident in which he rescued a woman, the Fox Weather meteorologist was about to go live on television to cover the flooding in the city. Just seconds before the cameras were to start rolling, he heard a woman screaming and begging anyone nearby for help; Dillen jumped to the rescue and pried the door of the automobile in which the woman was trapped open, then carried her out on his back and saved her himself.
Speaking about the incident about a year later, Dillen noted what happened, describing how the woman had tried driving through the increasingly flooded streets and got caught in water that ended up carrying her car downstream. Beginning, he said that he was “ready to go on the air, and I just all of a sudden hear some screaming. I turn around. I’m like, ‘Oh my.’ Someone drove in from the back side where we are, and it’s now floating down.”
Continuing, the meteorologist noted that the police and other emergency responders were far to busy to arrive to the situation and deal with it in time, and thus he decided to jump into action. He said, “I’m here because 911 is literally swamped. I think they’ve got so many calls going on, they’re not gonna get here in time. So I said, ‘Screw it. I’ll go get me go see if I can help this lady up.'”
Then, recounting the rescue itself, Dillen described how the car had to flood before the door could be pried open and the woman rescued, saying, “And that’s what I did. I peeled off all the microphones and I waded in. Window goes down, the pressure equalizes. I pry the door open, I grab her stuff, I put her on my back, and I wade back in, and I tell you what, she was a little woman, maybe about five foot 10, but she had a death grip on me.”
Concluding, he noted that he couldn’t just stand by and let her float by in the flood waters, or, even worse, drown in the flooded streets as he stood nearby, so he decided to do something as the man on the scene. He said, “She wasn’t gonna let go, and I wasn’t gonna let her go either. There’s no way I was going to watch this lady get taken away by the flood. As we were the only people there, we had to do something.”
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Watch the rescue and his recounting of it here: