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

Perhaps it was fate that a man’s pickup truck got stuck in the rising floodwaters caused by Hurricane Francine not far from where Miles Crawford lives.

The 39-year-old non-emergency room nurse is professionally trained in saving lives quickly, and that’s exactly what he did when he saw what happened 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 churning water up to his waist 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 lose.

He told the driver to go to the back of the truck cab, because the front of the pickup was tilted into deeper water. He grabbed the hammer, broke the back window and pulled the man out, at one point grabbing him as he began to fall into the rushing water.

About 10 minutes later, the pickup was completely submerged.

Crawford, an emergency room nurse at University Medical Center, said he got out of the water as soon as the man was safe and was never named. Crawford cut his hand in the rescue — a TV station that filmed it showed him wearing a large bandage — but that wasn’t a big deal for someone accustomed to trauma.

“It’s just second nature, I guess, as a nurse you just go in there and let it happen, right?” Crawford told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Thursday. “I just had to get him out of there.”