Eyewitnesses caught the moment firefighters pulled an elderly woman to safety as her car was surrounded by several feet of gushing floodwaters in a suburban street in Wichita, Kansas, on Tuesday as the Midwest and parts of the South were battered by storms, flooding and suspected tornadoes.
Colin Fee and Danielle Hart, who took the footage in Wichita, told NBC News that they saw two people being rescued from another car at the same time. The rescue was among some of the 77 “submersion calls” the Wichita Fire Department received from stranded drivers on Tuesday.
The fire department had pleaded with drivers to heed well-worn advice issued during floods: “Turn around, don’t drown.”
“The waters were rising, they were getting very close to her car being fully submerged, so she just looked like she was relieved and just happy to be alive,” Hart said.
The couple said the waters rose several feet in just 45 minutes and that they only received a warning “about an hour into the flood.”
A tornado warning was issued in Kansas City, Missouri, and social media users captured an enormous funnel cloud forming overhead, while a semi-trailer was overturned on Interstate 35. Another video showed heavy rain and winds blowing through Kauffman Stadium, home of the Royals, as tornado sirens blared.
One woman posted on TikTok that she and other shoppers had to shelter in the walk-in freezer of a Whole Foods branch.
Kansas City received a record-breaking 2.46 inches of rain on Tuesday, smashing the previous daily rainfall record of 2.25 inches set in 2015.
The city launched its Emergency Operation Team, which deals with major disasters, and said its crews had already begun assessing the damage and clearing debris last night. There have been no reports of injuries so far.
Some 18 million people from Kansas to Texas were under flash flood alerts Tuesday, and only isolated thunderstorms are expected Wednesday. But while the weather is set to calm on Wednesday, the reprieve is only brief.
A new round of moderate to heavy rain is expected Thursday night, with 33 million across a huge swath of the country at risk of severe thunderstorms, from the Great Lakes to eastern Texas.
“By Thursday night into Friday morning, a low pressure wave is forecast to form over the southern High Plains and then track eastward, setting the stage for a round of moderate to heavy rain and strong to severe thunderstorms to impact the south-central U.S. beginning Thursday night,” the National Weather Service said in a note Wednesday morning.
