By Robert Kittle
University of South Carolina police officers rescued a driver and passengers who were in an SUV that got stuck on a flooded campus street Thursday afternoon, with one officer carrying the driver to safety across the flooded street.
In video shot by USC student Jarrett Ritter, you can see Officer Jennifer Taylor carrying the elderly woman to safety, at one point falling into a deeper hole in the street that she couldn’t see because of the water. Two other officers helped the passengers who were in the vehicle. All of the officers declined to talk to the media about what they did, telling a university spokesperson they were “just doing their jobs.”
USC sophomore Thomas Aiken lives in an apartment building near the worst of the flooding. “I just saw a whole bunch of water all over the place and there were cars underwater. There were people standing around. There were police officers all over the place. So I was freaking out because I thought my car was underwater too, so I come running back here. Fortunately it wasn’t.”
Grad student Casey Cole says, “By the time I got back from class the water was up to my ankles, and so I had to kind of wade my way through. Thirty minutes later, my friend’s car was, the water was all the way up to the windows and the whole road was like a lake. It was just rushing around. And I moved my car just in time.”
It’s no surprise that several streets in Columbia were flooded Thursday. According to the National Weather Service, the city got more than 2.6 inches of rain, which is double the previous record rainfall total for September 24.
