When the International Pool|Spa|Patio Expo kicks off in New Orleans on Nov. 2, it might be easy to forget, amid the networking and comradery with industry peers, that the region was devastated weeks prior by a catastrophic flood that claimed 13 lives.
It may have been 16 if not for Arthur Murray.
On Aug. 13, the truck driver with Tara Liners was driving through the torrential downpour -- headed from Baton Rouge to Jackson, Miss. -- when closed roads forced him to take a detour. The heavy rain had eroded graveyards, causing caskets to float down the street on a current of brackish water, recalled Murray. It was somewhere along U.S. Highway 51 where authorities required compact vehicles to pull over to the side of the road, which was under at least a foot of water. Only large trucks, such as the big box freightliner that he was driving for the Owens Cross Roads, Ala.-based manufacturer, were permitted to move forward.
But Murray, 40, witnessed one car forge ahead.
“I knew it wasn’t going to make it,” he said. Sure enough, the small sedan “took a nosedive.” Moments later he heard shouting.
“Help me! My kids are in here,” Murray recalled the female driver yelling.
Murray jumped out of his big rig and waded through the rising water to the sinking car. Inside it were a panicked mother and her two children. The doors wouldn’t budge. So Murray sat on top of the car and kicked the passenger window with the heels of his feet until the glass broke. He took the girl, 11, to his truck first, then went back for her 9-year-old brother.
Fortunately, a U.S. Mail truck driver helped rescue the woman, who struggled to stay upright as they slogged toward Murray’s truck.
All the while, Murray’s wife was trying frantically to reach him on the phone that he had dropped in the water.
“She thought something bad was happening to me,” Murray said.
On the way to taking the family home, he was asked by the mother to keep an eye out for the father, who didn’t return home at his expected time and wasn’t returning calls. That’s why she and her children were out in the first place: They were looking for him in the storm.
“I never did see the dad,” the driver said.
Murray, who had only been on the job three months at this point, never imaged he’d be delivering something far more important than swimming pool liners and covers.
He’d deliver a family to safety.
To support the Red Cross's disaster relief efforts, Tara Liners will donate a portion of every liner sold in Louisiana through April 1, 2017.
