By Ted Waddell
ROSCOE — June 26, 2007 — “I was one of the lucky ones,” said a teary-eyed grandmother as she faced the NYC press on Thursday afternoon outside the local fire station.
On Tuesday night, June 19, as a flash flood began to rip down out of the hills above Colchester, all Debbie Bivens wanted to do was drive home to Downsville from her job as a nurse at the Roscoe Nursing Home.
But she didn’t get very far.
In a matter of minutes, Bivens found her self cut off, as the flood started to carve out the roadway on both sides of her Mitsubishi Outlander SUV.
“It was a great big gush of water,” she recalled on Thursday while facing a battery of NYC media camera outside the local firehouse, along with her 7-year-old granddaughter Tiffany Bivens.
As Bivens sat alone in her SUV, she watched in terror as huge trees and a camper were swept away.
“I saw the water wash out the road in front of me,” said Bivens. “I turned around, trying to head back to the nursing home, but by that time the water was washing over the bridge.”
About two and a half hours later, a group of four men – Tom Darby, Pete Johnston, Jason Rogers and Elwin Wood – parked their vehicles up at the nursing home and waded more than two miles through knee-high water to rescue Bivens and 17 other folks stranded by the flash flood.
“I thank God I’m one of the lucky ones,” said Bivens, starting to cry in front of all the cameras as she remembered friends lost in the flash flood.