The Angel of Indian Rocks
A once-in-a-lifetime flood didn’t stop a man on a paddleboard from rescuing his neighbours
When Hurricane Helene barrelled toward Florida’s west coast on 26 September 2024, authorities ordered the evacuation of the small community of Indian Rocks Beach, located on a barrier island just 7 to 10 feet above sea level. But with the Category 4 storm forecast to miss them by more than 160 kms, many residents, including surf instructor Marty Thomas, 52, stayed put.
Then, just before nightfall, with the power to the island cut off, a massive storm surge breached the town’s seawalls, dumping water into the streets. Thomas watched it grow from nothing to ankle high in minutes. He rushed to warn his neighbours in the single-storey, six-unit complex where he lived.
Thomas’s neighbours Mike Moran and his girlfriend, Heather Boles, began loading their dog and three cats as well as a few belongings into Moran’s Jeep. Thomas banged on the door of an elderly neighbour who was battling cancer, then helped him out of his bed and into the Jeep. Thomas also woke two remaining neighbours, who quickly piled into their own Jeep along with their pets. Moments later, they sped off, water nearly to their headlights.
Thomas remained behind. His friend George Grant, who lived down the street in a three-storey condo, had told him to come and spend the night if his place flooded. Now Thomas watched as rising water began spilling through the windows of his home. Time to split.
He selected a sturdy 12-foot paddleboard, threw some valuables into a backpack, clipped a flashlight to his waist, stood up on the board and paddled through dark, flooded streets to Grant’s condo, part of a series of townhouses. He was tying his board to a tree in chest-deep water when a woman called to him from a balcony. Pointing to a small apartment house across a flooded field, she said, “There’s a woman trapped in that house over there! Will you go check on her?”
“I’ll go,” Thomas holler...
When Hurricane Helene barrelled toward Florida’s west coast on 26 September 2024, authorities ordered the evacuation of the small community of Indian Rocks Beach, located on a barrier island just 7 to 10 feet above sea level. But with the Category 4 storm forecast to miss them by more than 160 kms, many residents, including surf instructor Marty Thomas, 52, stayed put.
Then, just before nightfall, with the power to the island cut off, a massive storm surge breached the town’s seawalls, dumping water into the streets. Thomas watched it grow from nothing to ankle high in minutes. He rushed to warn his neighbours in the single-storey, six-unit complex where he lived.
Thomas’s neighbours Mike Moran and his girlfriend, Heather Boles, began loading their dog and three cats as well as a few belongings into Moran’s Jeep. Thomas banged on the door of an elderly neighbour who was battling cancer, then helped him out of his bed and into the Jeep. Thomas also woke two remaining neighbours, who quickly piled into their own Jeep along with their pets. Moments later, they sped off, water nearly to their headlights.
Thomas remained behind. His friend George Grant, who lived down the street in a three-storey condo, had told him to come and spend the night if his place flooded. Now Thomas watched as rising water began spilling through the windows of his home. Time to split.
He selected a sturdy 12-foot paddleboard, threw some valuables into a backpack, clipped a flashlight to his waist, stood up on the board and paddled through dark, flooded streets to Grant’s condo, part of a series of townhouses. He was tying his board to a tree in chest-deep water when a woman called to him from a balcony. Pointing to a small apartment house across a flooded field, she said, “There’s a woman trapped in that house over there! Will you go check on her?”
“I’ll go,” Thomas hollered back.
He unhitched his paddleboard and headed to the building, where 56-year-old science teacher Valerie Anderson was stuck with her 38-kilo Bernese mountain dog. Inside her apartment, the water level continued to rise, but Anderson didn’t dare try an escape on her own. Outside, the rushing water and submerged obstacles would make it easy to slip and get swept out into the bay. Thomas tried the door, but the immense weight of the water made it impossible to open. “Go to the window on the side!” he shouted.
Anderson waded back to her bedroom and slid open the window. Thomas climbed inside and helped Anderson and her dog out of the building. With the Bernese on the nose of the board and Anderson hanging on to the side, Thomas swam them across the street to a townhouse, where a friend had told Anderson she could stay.
The wind gusted at 80 kph, and the horizon glowed orange from a distant fire. Trash barrels floated past the roofs of submerged vehicles. Along the paddleboard’s nose shone eerie green bioluminescence stirred up by the flood. From the balconies of the townhomes, neighbours aimed flashlights to guide Thomas and Anderson.
As Anderson climbed to safety, she told Thomas, “My neighbour is next door with her daughter, and they need help.”
Back he went to Anderson’s building, where a woman and a teenage girl were holed up in their ground-level apartment with two small dogs and a larger pit bull that was panicked by the storm.
“I’ll get your daughter and the little dogs first,” Thomas told the woman. “Then I’ll come back for you and the other dog.”
The girl and the two dogs climbed out a window and perched on the front of the board. Thomas lay face down on the rear, kicking and paddling back through the deluge to drop them off with Anderson. But when he returned, the pit bull snarled and growled, refusing to go with him. The woman refused to leave her dog. For 10 minutes, with the water still rising, Thomas urged the woman to abandon the dog.
“Listen,” he said. “Your daughter needs you. And I can’t be sitting here in this water arguing with you.” At last, the woman relented. They coaxed the dog on to the bed, where it would be saved later, then exited by the window and joined Anderson and the others.
Then Thomas spotted a flashlight blinking inside another apartment across from the townhomes. He paddled back over and found an older woman trapped inside. He ripped a screen out of a window, pulled the woman through and floated her to a taller building next door.
When he returned to Grant’s condo, Thomas was met with yet another request: to rescue a couple trapped with their dogs in a duplex about 90 metres down the street.
The couple, retirees Andy and Gerry McIntosh, lived half a kilometre away but had come to check on Andy’s sister Ann McIntosh, 73, who owned the duplex. The rising water had trapped them there, and they’d opted to overnight in the building’s vacant front unit. Now they found themselves standing in three feet of water in the kitchen, their dogs in the sink, furniture floating everywhere, certain they were about to die.
When Thomas arrived, he couldn’t open the kitchen window and didn’t want to break it and drag them through broken glass. So Andy pushed aside the floating refrigerator and waded to the front door, which was held shut by the pressure of the water. As Thomas and a neighbour, Joe Carr, pushed the door from the outside, Andy pulled from the inside. The door creaked open. Thomas guided the McIntoshes to Grant’s building with the dogs riding and the couple clinging to the board. But Andy’s sister was still in the back unit of the duplex. Once more Thomas struck out through wind and waves. He found Ann at her bedroom window, whisked her through and delivered her safely to the second-floor apartment—which was now water-level—where her brother and sister-in-law were waiting.
At last Thomas put away his paddleboard, glad he’d stashed a couple of beers in his backpack before abandoning his apartment. Tomorrow, they would start the clean-up. But tonight he had rescued 10 residents of the town where he’d grown up.
Ann McIntosh calls him the angel of Indian Rocks Beach. Valerie Anderson agrees. “He put himself in danger to save other people’s lives,” she says.
Thomas demurs: “It was a little hairy, but I surf in big waves.” Anyway, he says, “They were my neighbours.”
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