Readers Digest NZ Dec/Jan 2025

backpack, clipped a flashlight to his waist, stood up on the board and pad- dled through dark, flooded streets to Grant’s condo, part of a series of town- houses. He was tying his board to a tree in chest-deep water when a woman called to him from a balcony. Pointing to a small apartment house across a flooded field, she said, “There’s a woman trapped in that house over there! Will you go check on her?” “I’ll go,” Thomas hollered back. He unhitched his paddleboard and headed to the building, where 56-year- old science teacher Valerie Anderson was stuck with her 85-pound Bernese mountain dog. Inside her apartment, the water level continued to rise, but Anderson didn’t dare try an escape on her own. Outside, the rushing water and submerged obstacles would make it easy to slip and get swept out into the bay. Thomas tried the door, but the immense weight of the water made it impossible to open. “Go to the window on the side!” he shouted. Anderson waded back to her bed- room and slid open the window. Thomas climbed inside and helped Anderson and her dog out of the build- ing. With the Bernese on the nose of the board and Anderson hanging on to the side, Thomas swam them across the street to a townhouse, where a friend had told Anderson she could stay. The wind gusted at 50 mph, and the horizon glowed orange from a distant fire. Trash barrels floated past the roofs of submerged vehicles. Along the paddleboard’s nose shone eerie green bioluminescence stirred up by the flood. From the balconies of the town- homes, neighbors aimed flashlights to guide Thomas and Anderson. As Anderson climbed to safety, she toldThomas, “My neighbor is next door with her daughter, and they need help.” Back he went to Anderson’s building, where a woman and a teenage girl were holed up in their ground-level apart- ment with two small dogs and a larger pit bull that was panicked by the storm. “I’ll get your daughter and the little dogs first,” Thomas told the woman. “Then I’ll come back for you and the other dog.” The girl and the two dogs climbed out a window and perched on the front of the board. Thomas lay face down on the rear, kicking and paddling back through the deluge to drop them off with Anderson. But when he returned, the pit bull snarled and growled, refus- ing to go with him. The woman refused to leave her dog. For 10 minutes, with the water still rising, Thomas urged the woman to abandon the dog. “Listen,” he said. “Your daughter needs you. And I can’t be sitting here in this water arguing with you.” At last, the woman relented. They coaxed the dog onto the bed, where it would be saved later, then exited by the window and joined Anderson and the others. Then Thomas spotted a flashlight blinking inside another apartment across from the townhomes. He paddled back over and found an older woman reader ’ s digest 12   december 2025/january 2026 trapped inside. He ripped a screen out of a window, pulled the woman through and floated her to a taller building next door. When he returned to Grant’s condo, Thomas was met with yet another request: to rescue a couple trapped with their dogs in a duplex about 100 yards down the street. The couple, retirees Andy and Gerry McIntosh, lived half a mile away but had come to check on Andy’s sister Ann McIntosh, 73, who owned the duplex. The rising water had trapped them there, and they’d opted to overnight in the building’s vacant front unit. Now they found themselves standing in 3 feet of water in the kitchen, their dogs in the sink, furniture floating every- where, certain they were about to die. When Thomas arrived, he couldn’t open the kitchen window and didn’t want to break it and drag them through broken glass. So Andy pushed aside the float- ing refrigerator and waded to the front door, which was held shut by the pressure of the water. As Thomas and a neighbor, Joe Carr, pushed the door from the outside, Andy pulled from the inside. The door creaked open. Thomas guided the McIntoshes to Grant’s building with the dogs riding and the couple clinging to the board. But Andy’s sister was still in the back unit of the duplex. Once more Thomas struck out through wind and waves. He found Ann at her bedroom window, whisked her through and delivered her safely to the second-floor apartment—which was now water-level—where her brother and sister-in-law were waiting. At last Thomas put away his paddle- board, glad he’d stashed a couple of beers in his backpack before abandon- ing his apartment. Tomorrow, they would start the cleanup. But tonight he had rescued 10 residents of the town where he’d grown up. Ann McIntosh calls him the angel of Indian Rocks Beach. Valerie Anderson agrees. “He put himself in danger to save other people’s lives,” she says. Thomas demurs: “It was a little hairy, but I surf in big waves.” Anyway, he says, “They were my neighbors.” Rescuers and the rescued. From left: George Grant, Joe Carr, Valerie Anderson, Marty Thomas, Heather Boles, Mike Moran, Andy McIntosh. readersdigest.co.nz     13 Everyday Heroes