PILCHER: About how many, can you calculate how many people you actually rescued during that time?
SULLIVAN: Well—
PILCHER: I know rescue’s a nebulous term.
SULLIVAN: Yeah. And it’s, it’s rescued from what? Maybe from life-threatening situations: 4 or 5.
We had a lot of people that they were put in positions where they rescued more. I’m grateful that I didn’t have to encounter that because I know they had some emotional stuff from that. We had people that were plucked off of the tops of their cars; we had people that were, one person had to reach out with a tree limb to grab someone floating down the flood water, floating down this area that, it was like a miniature river. We had one of our volunteer members, who was brand-new, he had been in for all of two months and was exposed to all that. He was out there and he actually had two people die on him. They, it was an elderly couple, and they were in a vehicle that had been submerged; they were able to get them out of the vehicle, and he was performing CPR on them for 20 minutes, couldn’t revive them. So he was torn up about it.
Rescuing, I don’t know, I encounter thousands of people. I was able to help a lot of people in a lot of different ways. If not just being out there and being a presence and showing people that there are people out here if something goes wrong. If you encounter something, you’re there. There were a lot of people that did helluva lot more than I did and I’m grateful I didn’t have to stand in their shoes at the time. But, I mean, you’re put in that situation, you do what you have to.
Excerpted from: Michael Sullivan Oral History Interview. Born-digital recording(s) converted to mp3 format for online access in 2012 from 16bit 44.1khz WAV file archival master recording.
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