Texas Storm Squad

OPERATOR (over phone): Hello. 911. Where is your emergency?

WOMAN (over phone): We're, like, on a hill.

We're over here off of Walden but, I mean, inside our house is flooded.

WOMAN (over phone): The water is in my car.

OPERATOR (over phone): You get out and go somewhere safe,

and then I'll call your cell phone.

OPERATOR (over phone): Can I help you?

MAN (over phone): I'm trying to get to my house, 'cause it's flooded.

WOMAN (over phone): My mama house is flooding.

- The water is rising inside here. - OPERATOR (over phone): Okay.

WOMAN (over phone): She got kids in the house.

What, what is she supposed to do?

MAN (over phone): I literally have water up to the top

of the floorboards in my home.

OPERATOR (over phone): Okay.

MAN (over phone): I'm flooded out I'm guessing,

- I'm stuck on the Walden. - OPERATOR (over phone): Get out.

MAN (over phone): This water is up to my knees.

WOMAN (over phone): I know, I'm just goin' over there.

I gotta get outta the car.

WOMAN (over phone): Water's at the door right now.

Water's coming through the flues in my house.

OPERATOR (over phone): Okay. We've got your call,

and we're gonna get someone to you as soon as we can.

I will never forget it.

A phone rang and they turned the lights on, and they said,

"Everyone up. We have to go, and we have to go now."

We were told that we had five minutes to get ready,

load everything up, and go to, towards Beaumont.

If a phone rings in a environment like that...

something has gone wrong.

And when the bottom dropped out, it was big.

Just after midnight on September 19th,

a team of elite rescue specialists

from Texas A&M Task Force 1 are scrambling.

It's 10 after 12:00 and we got the wake-up call

to go to Beaumont, Texas as quickly as possible.

I mean, something's up.

Something's up in East Texas.

A tropical storm, Imelda,

has made landfall on the Gulf Coast,

but it's doing something no one expected.

Forecasts said it would move quickly north and dissipate.

Instead, it's staying put over East Texas,

inundating it with record-breaking levels of rain.

Danny Watkins and his team are one of six units

being deployed to the disaster hot zone.

DANNY (off screen): Beaumont, it's in a flood prone area,

and they're requesting as many resources

as they can get right now.

We have no clue what's going on.

All we know is that it's raining

and it was just coming down hard,

and we had to get there.

Not quite sure what, uh, what we're gonna see when we get there.

With low lying land

and a coastline on the Gulf of Mexico

where hurricanes build throughout the humid summer months,

Texas is particularly at risk of catastrophic flooding.

REPORTER (over TV): After pounding South Texas Wednesday afternoon,

Hurricane Dolly has lost some...

REPORTER (over TV): We have 160 mph wind.

REPORTER (over TV): Underlined the warnings of the approach

of Hurricane Carla.

REPORTER (over TV): Hurricane Humberto slammed

into Southeast Texas early Thursday.

REPORTER (over TV): Ike leaves no doubt this was a powerful hurricane.

In Texas, we're very good about respecting hurricanes.

People will go, "I need to evacuate."

Tropical rains, not so much.

You just don't know how bad it's gonna be.

It could be that it drops 10 inches of rain, and it's not a problem.

Or it could be it drops 44 inches of rain in 24 hours,

which is a significant problem.

Tropical Storm Imelda's rapid rainfall

has caught everyone unawares,

and in the Beaumont area, 85 miles east of Houston,

that rain has nowhere to go.

The soil around Beaumont is full of clay,

which means it can't absorb water easily.

Instead of soaking into the ground,

heavy rainfall runs off into local waterways

or collects on the surface, causing flash flooding.

So, when they said Beaumont was flooding,

we immediately took all the resources that we had

and we moved 'em into the area.

Over 100,000 residents are at risk here,

many in small, rural communities,

with limited resources to cope with the freak storm.

When we got to Beaumont, we parked, got out,

and started getting in dry suits right away.

We were not there long.

Highly trained and with specialist equipment,

Texas A&M Task Force 1 deploy to disaster zones across America.

Stepping in when local emergency services become overwhelmed.

On the outskirts of Beaumont, in the small town of Fannett

rescue efforts are in the hands of volunteer firefighter

Ashley Kester.

The calls at the very beginning were trickling in,

two to three a minute.

I had time to write it down and process it

to determine who and which truck I could send.

All of that pretty much went out the window.

Before I knew it, we had six or eight calls holding.

And it was at that point that my chief said,

"I need you to take this over."

He departed to go and assist with rescue efforts.

The call volume, however, increased.

MAN (over phone): Yes, right now, it's to knees.

It was about eight o'clock

when I noticed the water was starting to come up out of the ditches.

About an hour later, and the water was about

a foot and a half running across under my house.

10:30, 11 o'clock, it started coming in my house.

The water was rising and they wanted to get out.

It was right up to the edge of our thresholds on the door,

and I knew I had to make plans on getting out.

I have a two-year-old daughter. Her name's Paisley.

She is our world.

You know, I wasn't so much concerned with myself,

but I wanted my daughter and my wife and my mother

out of the house.

That's the only grand baby I have,

and I wanna make sure they're safe.

Panic started to set in throughout the community.

We didn't have what we needed

to be able to rescue all of these people.

In fact, one of our pick-up trucks that we were using

flooded out.

My chief was in it.

I was on the phone with him, and he told me

that the truck was floating.

VOICE (over phone): Please hang up and try again.

WOMAN (over phone): So, someone is stuck in their car, and they're about to drown.

At that point, it got real.

Danny's is one of two teams immediately sent to rescue

the residents of hard-hit Fannett.

So, the Texas Task Force arrived

in the early morning hours,

and it was a sense of relief on my end,

because we finally had somebody else who could help.

And when I showed up, I was like, "Hey, Texas Task Force 1.

This is what equipment we have. This is our capabilities."

You know, "What do you need?"

She says that they're just swamped with calls right now.

People trapped in cars, trapped in houses

and they got no way to get to them.

She had a phone on each ear.

She was frazzled a little bit, but she was killing it.

She had pages and pages and pages

of peoples' names, phone numbers, and addresses,

and all it said beside it was "rescue, rescue, rescue."

Greg's getting an assignment right now.

We're gonna try and get a grip, figure out where we're going.

Yeah, I knew to tell her right off the bat,

"Don't just give me the first one on the list."

You know, let's, let's triage this situation out.

We need to find out if they just need to be evacuated,

and they have a couple of feet of water in their house.

Or is this a true rescue where,

you know, the water's coming in,

it's come up above over a foot in an hour,

who have infants in,

or, you know, people who can't take care of themselves, or seniors.

To reach the huge number of people needing rescue,

the unit splits into two teams,

each with one high profile vehicle, or HPV, and one rescue boat.

Team Leader Greg Qualls rides in one HPV.

Danny Watkins is in the other.

The night we got deployed,

it was myself, Dave, and John John.

Very focused, very team oriented, goal objective people.

Danny once played for the Philadelphia Eagles.

He left behind a career in the NFL

to serve as a firefighter, before joining the Task Force.

It's more rewarding to me

to go out and be able to help people

and make a direct impact.

Danny, Dave, and John's first assignment

of the triage 911 calls is Lucy,

a grandmother who's stranded alone in her single story home,

surrounded by rising floodwater.

Two miles down that route, we encountered water.

We had no clue as far as how much we're dealing with.

All we knew is that the road was not passable

by a regular vehicle.

Lucy's family can't get to her,

and getting in her own car is out of the question.

Driving in a flood is dangerous.

Nearly two in three flood deaths in the US involve vehicles.

Just six inches of water causes most cars to stall and lose control.

Two feet of water will carry away even a 7,000 pound pick-up truck.

You can certainly drown in your vehicle,

or if you get out, you can be washed downstream.

But with rapidly rising water levels,

staying at home isn't safe for Lucy either.

You may be in your house

and now you have ten feet of water,

and you're in a single story house,

you have a good chance of drowning.