Angelina Madut knew driving home from her overnight shift at a suburban Atlanta bakery was a risk.
The warnings about Helene’s potential to flood neighborhoods and topple trees had been in play for hours. But like anyone who couldn’t take the financial hit of missing a day of work because of the storm, Madut got in her car.
She had to get home from work.
At the same time early Friday, a news crew had set up in the city’s Buckhead neighborhood — not far from Peachtree Creek — to report on whatever damage Helene had in store.
As Madut navigated before dawn into the city — and onto that same street — she didn’t realize how much water had pooled in front of her on the road.
Soon, her car lost traction.
And then, it started to float.
She called her husband, Ernest.
“You need to, if you can, reverse the car,” he told her. “You need to just open the window and get on the roof of the car and see whether you can be seen by anybody.”
“In the meantime,” he said, “I need to call 911.”
Ernest Madut hung up and called the emergency number to report where someone — anyone — could find his stranded wife, he later told CNN.
Then, he called her back.
Angelina Madut by that time had noticed people in a vehicle nearby — the journalists, including former HLN meteorologist Bob Van Dillen.
“OK, can you roll down the window?” Ernest asked his wife.
But when she did, the water came in, her husband later recalled.
Angelina panicked.
“Wave at them!” he screamed.
Van Dillen spotted her.
And jumped into action.
The veteran newsman rushed into a flood as deep as his chest and pulled Madut from her white sedan — and onto his own back.
Then, with Madut’s hands clasped together around his chest, Van Dillen began trudging up Sagamore Drive, Madut leaning off his left side, video from Fox Weather shows. With each step, her soaked black and white shirt and jeans emerged at the surface.
“She was cold. I gave her my shirt,” Van Dillen told his colleagues, according to the video. “Her husband’s gonna pick her up, and the fire truck came. They’re good. Everyone’s good.”
After daybreak, Madut’s car still sat in the brown flood, only its roof and the top inches of its windows visible.
Dramatic rescue in flooded Atlanta neighborhood
As far as she’s concerned, a shaken Madut told CNN, Van Dillen saved her life.
Later, after her husband arrived, Van Dillen advised him not to drive toward the overtopped creek, to go another way instead.
As for Madut, her hero offered this: “You can keep the shirt,” he said of the bright red top. “Keep it. It’s all yours.”
