Child And Woman Carried To Safety From School Van Trapped In Istanbul Floodwater

Rescuers carried a young child and a woman through knee-deep floodwater to a waiting fire truck after a school van was stranded on a flooded road in Istanbul.

Footage released by Turkey’s General Directorate of Forestry on October 14 was filmed from the cab of one of its fire trucks as heavy rain pounded the city. It shows a rescuer wading through the brown water carrying the child in a blue raincoat, then returning from the stranded van with a woman on his back. “Hop in, Yusuf,” a man says by the truck’s open door. Later scenes show crews in hard hats working at night among fallen branches in a flooded forest.

Heavy rain hit Istanbul on October 14. The Istanbul Governor’s Office said emergency services received 2,518 calls between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m. that day, including 1,277 reports of flooding, 15 landslides and 47 cases of people trapped. Turkey’s interior minister later said two people had died in Istanbul and that 2,727 stranded residents had been evacuated.