Tense Rescues Follow Massive Water Main Break

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Rescue Workers Save Stranded Drivers

Emergency personnel rescue trapped motorists from a flooded street after a 66-inch water main burst in Montgomery County Tuesday morning.

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Among those rescued was Sharon Schoem, who was on her way to work at Potomac Elementary School just before 8 a.m. when a wall of rocks, water and dirt came rushing toward her car. She thought about turning around, but feared she would not have time.

She put her Nissan Altima in park and, with shaking hands, used her cell phone to call her fiancé.

"Oh my God," she recalled saying. "It looks like I'm in a river."

As water washed over the roof of her car, she could no longer see out the windows. She worried that the current would tip the car over.

Behind her, firefighter Anthony Bell and two colleagues were just starting the day with a drive up River Road. Bell was at the wheel of the truck when "the road literally exploded" and water started pouring over cars, he said.

The three firefighters put on swift-water rescue suits but decided it would not be safe to wade through rushing water to the trapped drivers. So they drove their truck from car to car, pulling four people to safety, including Schoem.

"We made a decision," said Bell, a 22-year veteran of the Cabin John Park Volunteer Fire Department. "We were going to get them out."

Several drivers were taken to the fire department's headquarters on River Road, where blankets and space heaters were waiting. Silvia Saldana said she cried, prayed and called her husband at their Springfield home three times, asking him to pray for her as she sat trapped in her Subaru, fearing she would die.

"I thought, 'I guess this is my day,' " Saldana, 56, said in Spanish with tears in her eyes as she warmed up at the Cabin John Volunteer Fire station, where rescuers took her.

Neustadt said the depth and speed of the current also made it too dangerous for workers to reach the site where the 44-year-old pipe had ruptured and turn off the valve. Instead, workers cut the supply from the Potomac Filtration Plant to reduce the amount of water flowing through the pipe, which is a direct line from the plant. They closed two valves, one above the break and one below it, to isolate the rupture, Neustadt said.

The flow had subsided substantially by 11:30 a.m. Because the supply from the filtration plant was affected, customers as far east as Silver Spring were experiencing low water pressure.

The final rescues took place about 9:30 a.m., when two women were pulled from a white Nissan into a flat-bottomed rescue boat that was tethered to a helicopter hovering overhead. Rescue workers guided the boat to the side of the flooded road, and the women, clinging to ropes, pulled themselves up a wooded embankment to dry land.