Last week, the roads from Londonderry to Ludlow were calm and clear. It’s less than half an hour’s drive on Route 100 between the towns. But last summer, amid record flooding, Drew Hazelton and his team were told the route was entirely unnavigable.
“You can’t get to Ludlow from here,’ Hazelton, Rescue Inc. chief of operations, recalled hearing repeatedly when he and his team asked locals for rides on July 10, 2023 along that route. His team was responding to a call about a stranded trucker in Ludlow, but so much of the road had flooded that they had to leave their truck behind and wade, swim and hitchhike the last nine miles.
“Well, we finally stopped asking the question, and we said, ‘can you get us closer to Ludlow?’” Hazelton said. “‘I understand we can’t get to Ludlow, but can you get us closer?’”
For their dramatic rescue of the trucker — part of a multi-agency, multi-day response to the flooding emergency that devastated Vermont last summer — his team was awarded last week with an international award.
The Higgins and Langley Incident Award is regarded as the most prestigious in swift-water rescuing, honoring “a specific water rescue, recovery operation, or prolonged mission that clearly demonstrates outstanding training, skill and preparedness in a swiftwater or flood rescue,” according to the Higgins and Langley Memorial Awards website.
Hazelton said his team, one of two Rescue Inc. swift-water teams on duty responding to the summer 2023 flooding, was working at the time with a number of other Vermont swift-water rescue teams, and several that were brought in from other states for the emergency.
Hazelton recalled the July 10 rescue from Rescue Inc.’s Brattleboro station last Friday, pointing out all of the trucks, boats and heavy equipment that they were ultimately not able to bring with them to Ludlow.
Rescuers had to leave the trucks behind, Hazelton said, because the water was too high and the road itself had been swept away. That’s when they jogged, waded, swam and hitched around a half-dozen rides from people stranded at various high points, including the Chester Fire Department.
When the team arrived, the man’s 18-wheeler had been swept away and he was staying afloat on an overturned hot tub, which had gotten stuck in the branches of a downed tree. They set up atop Sam’s Steakhouse, where the water level was nearly at the roof, and sent a swimmer with a rope downstream to retrieve the man.
“And then my role in the rescue,” Hazelton said, “was to recover both the swimmer and the victim by pulling them back up-river 220 feet.”
“Then, just because Mother Nature wasn’t done, we had to walk back to our trucks and we ended up encountering a mudslide on the way back,” he added, laughing.
By the next morning, the water had completely receded from that area of Ludlow, but Hazelton said the hot tub had been swept away. He said the seven-person unit was active for two more full days.
The team was presented with the award in South Bend, Ind. on June 16, Hazelton said. He and six other Rescue Inc. team members, as well as Phil Edgerley of Vermont’s Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) team who assisted them in the rescue, were honored during the International Association of Water Rescue Professionals’ annual conference, where they also participated in training sessions.
“Rescue Inc. is one of the State of Vermont’s most robust Swiftwater Rescue partners and we are extremely proud of their accomplishment of receiving this award,” wrote Mike Cannon, coordinator of the state USAR team, in a press release.
Hazelton said it was “pretty cool” to be a part of the only U.S. team this year to receive a Higgins and Langley award for a specific incident response.
“We were very excited to get the award,” Hazelton said. “But we also know that there was a ton of other good work that was done, we know that there are other teams that really worked hard to rescue people. So, you know, you want to share that with everybody that was part of the team.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Southern Vermont swift-water rescue team honored for flood response.