An ER nurse says it was 'second nature' to rescue a man trapped in hurricane floodwaters

NEW ORLEANS — Perhaps it was fate that a man's pickup truck got trapped in rising floodwaters unleashed by Hurricane Francine not far from where Miles Crawford lives.

The 39-year-old off-duty emergency room nurse is professionally trained in saving lives — quickly — and that's exactly what he did the moment he saw what was happening Wednesday night in his New Orleans neighborhood.

Crawford grabbed a hammer from his house and ran to the underpass where the truck was stuck, wading through swirling waist-high water to reach the driver. When he got there, he saw that the water was already up to the man's head. There was no time to waste.

He told the driver to move to the back of the truck’s cab since the front end of the pickup was angled down in deeper water. Gripping the hammer, he smashed out the back window and hauled the man out, at one point grabbing him just as he began to fall into the rushing water.

“It was kind of instinctive,” Crawford told The Associated Press. “Didn’t take much to break the window and pull the guy out.”

About 10 minutes later, the pickup was fully submerged.

Crawford, an ER nurse at University Medical Center, said he got out of the water as soon as the man was safe and never did get his name. Crawford cut his hand in the rescue — a TV station that filmed it showed him wearing a large bandage — but that was not a big deal for someone used to trauma.

“It’s just second nature, I guess, being a nurse, you just go in and get it done, right?” Crawford said. “I just had to get him out of there.”