A Dallas school bus driver and a bus monitor help save two siblings from rising floodwaters. A brother and sister were playing in the rain outside their southeast Dallas home when fast moving floodwaters pushed them into the brush. "It was horrible, my legs were stuck," 11-year-old Gabriel Garner recalls. And his 13-year-old sister, Trinity Miller, wasn’t able to help him as she was struggling against the flow of water too.
At that moment, a Dallas school bus was passing by and the crew onboard realized the siblings needed help. Bus driver Simone Edmond positioned the bus to try to ease the flow of water pinning the boy to the tree. And then bus monitor Tekendra Valentine came up with the idea to string several wheelchair seat belts together to use as a rope to pull the boy to safety.
Neighbors who’d come over to help formed a human chain and with the seatbelts were able to pull the children out of the rushing water. "The whole ordeal lasted between 30 and 45 minutes,” wrote the school district in a statement. “When it was all over, the children, their family, the fire department and all of Dallas ISD were so very happy and relieved that everyone was safe." In spite of everything, Edmond doesn’t consider herself a hero. "I just feel like I was doing what I needed to do at the time,” she says. “And if I had to, I would do it all over again,"