A Delivery Driver Tied a Garden Hose Around His Waist and Waded Into a Flash Flood to Save a Boy. Then the Grate Snapped
A Delivery Driver Tied a Garden Hose Around His Waist and Waded Into a Flash Flood to Save a Boy. Then the Grate Snapped. Here is what happened next.
People who don’t live in Las Vegas don’t understand how fast it happens. One minute the desert is dry and cracked and the sky is just a little dark over the mountains. Twenty minutes later, a dry wash that kids ride bikes in every afternoon turns into a brown, roaring river carrying shopping carts, branches, and whole fences toward the storm tunnels under the city.
Eleven-year-old Mateo Ruiz knew that. His mom had told him a hundred times. But his dog, Pepper, a scruffy black-and-white mutt, had chased a jackrabbit down into the wash, and Mateo had gone after her.
Then the water came.
By the time anyone saw him, he was hanging onto a rusted iron grate at the mouth of a concrete drainage channel in the northwest part of the city, the current tearing at his legs, his sneakers already gone. Behind the grate was the black mouth of a storm tunnel. If he let go, the water would take him straight into it.
A neighbor on the bank started filming, screaming for someone to call 911.
“Help me!” Mateo cried. His voice was barely audible over the water. “Please!”
There were maybe six people on the bank. A woman in scrubs. Two teenagers. An older couple. Nobody knew what to do. The water was moving too fast. One of the teenagers took a step down the slope and the mud nearly took his feet out from under him.
That’s when a brown delivery van screeched to a stop on the road above the wash.
The driver jumped out. His name was Andre Coleman, he was thirty-one, and he had been running late on his route for two hours because of the storm. He took one look at the boy on the grate and ran. Not toward the water. Toward the nearest house.
There was a green garden hose coiled on a hook by the front porch. Andre ripped it off the spigot, ran back, and started tying one end around his own waist in a knot as he came down the slope.
“Hold this!” he yelled to the people on the bank, tossing them the other end. “Don’t let go! Whatever happens, don’t let go!”
The woman in scrubs grabbed it. Then the teenagers. Then the older man. They dug their heels into the mud.
Andre stepped into the flood.
The water hit him at the knees and nearly knocked him over. By the third step it was at his waist. By the fifth it was at his chest, brown and freezing and full of debris. On the video you can see a broken branch slam into his shoulder. He didn’t stop.
“I got you, buddy! Look at me! I got you!”
He reached the grate. He grabbed Mateo’s arm. For one second, everybody on the bank cheered.
Then there was a sound like a gunshot.
The old iron grate, which had been rusting in that channel for thirty years, tore loose from the concrete. The whole thing, boy and man and grate, lurched toward the tunnel.
The hose snapped tight. The people on the bank were jerked forward. The woman in scrubs went down on one knee in the mud. The older man yelled. The hose started sliding through their hands.
“PULL!” one of the teenagers screamed. “PULL! PULL!”
More people came running. A man from across the street. A woman still holding her car keys. Someone’s grandmother. They grabbed the hose, they grabbed each other’s waists, and they leaned back with everything they had.
Inch by inch, it worked.
Andre got one arm around Mateo’s chest. He kicked away the grate and let the current take it into the tunnel. Then the human chain on the bank dragged them both, coughing and choking, up onto the mud.
People were crying. Somebody was praying out loud. The woman in scrubs was already checking Mateo’s pulse.
Andre lay on his back in the mud, gasping, staring up at the gray sky.
“You’re okay,” he panted. “You’re okay, little man. You’re safe.”
But Mateo wasn’t looking at him.
He was sitting up, shaking, pointing back at the black mouth of the storm tunnel, where the flood was still roaring into the dark.
“My dog,” he sobbed. “My dog’s still in there! Pepper’s still in there!”
Everyone went quiet.
And then, from somewhere deep inside that tunnel, echoing off the concrete over the roar of the water, came a bark.
Andre slowly sat up. He looked at the tunnel. He looked at the hose still tied around his waist.
And then he started to untie the knot.
What Happened Next
“Don’t you dare,” the woman in scrubs said, grabbing his arm. “You’ll die in there.” Andre knew she was right. The tunnel was a death trap in a flood. He tied the knot back.
But the bark came again, and this time it was closer. Andre crawled to the edge of the channel, just above the tunnel’s mouth, and saw it: a narrow concrete ledge running along the inside wall, maybe a foot above the waterline. And on that ledge, soaked and shivering, was Pepper.
The Second Rescue
Firefighters from Las Vegas Fire and Rescue arrived three minutes later with a swift-water team. Andre showed them the ledge. One rescuer was lowered on a rope to the tunnel mouth and called the dog. Pepper wouldn’t come. She was too scared.
So Mateo called her. Wrapped in a firefighter’s blanket, standing on the bank, he whistled the two-note whistle he used every day after school. Pepper scrambled along the ledge, straight into the rescuer’s arms. The crowd that had pulled the hose erupted.
After the Flood
Mateo spent one night in the hospital for observation and came home with nothing worse than bruises. Pepper had a cut paw. Andre had a dislocated shoulder and a sprained wrist. His delivery company, after the video spread, gave him a paid week off and a commendation.
The homeowner whose hose he borrowed refused to take it back. It now hangs on the wall of Andre’s apartment, cut and frayed. Every Sunday, Mateo and his mom bring Andre dinner. Pepper comes too. She won’t leave his side.
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