Fallout from Typhoon Hinnamnor has made heroes out of many villagers in our very own Jiangsu Province, they together with authorities having affected life-saving rescues of four people who had found themselves in deep water, literally.
It was just in the past few days that the Typhoon waded through parts of Jiangsu. Up north in the countryside surrounding the city of Suqian, a sports utility vehicle (SUV) catastrophically failed to pass a number of electric bikes and ended up in a local river running dangerously high water levels.
With a family of three trapped in the rapidly-sinking SUV, villagers nearby who had witnessed the accident sprang into action.
More than a dozen villagers in the vicinity rushed to the rescue and called the police. The smart ones went home first to grab a pair of scissors, with which they were able to cut the seat belts that were also trapping the family in their car.
As The Paper reported yesterday, 7 September, the three family members were were successfully rescued, brought ashore and sent to the hospital for treatment.
Elsewhere, eastern Jiangsu was the setting for another rescue of one who had inadvertently ended up in a local river.
Haimen is a district under the administration of Nantong City on the banks of the Yangtze River, north of Shanghai’s Chongming Island. There, in the rural surroundings of the village of Yuehe, an octogenarian woman accidentally fell into local waters on 4 September.
After receiving the alarm, Chen Hongliang, Deputy Director of Yuelai Police Station, and an auxiliary police officer rushed to the scene immediately. Chen told a reporter for the Yangtze Evening News that the river was deep because of the storm that had come in from Taiwan over the past couple of days.
Discovering that the 80-plus-year old cannot swim, Chen talked with the elderly woman to calm her.
But the soft, wet and slippery soil on the river banks made a rescue attempt very difficult. In the end, a human chain was formed with the help of villagers, enabling Chen to drag the worm from the waters, her body constantly shaking.
Chen and his assistant then carried the senior to a waiting ambulance without even bothering to put their shoes back on, and accompanied her to the hospital for treatment. The old woman survived her ordeal without injury.
