Bodycam footage from rescuers shows two infants recovered from US tornado rubble
FRANKFORT, KENTUKY: Two babies survived a tornado in Kentucky even though it ripped the bathtub they were sheltering in out of the ground and tossed it into the yard.
In bodycam footage of the incident, police officers are seen racing against time as they lift the overturned bathtub, finding the boy and girl alive. One deputy says, “both of them are okay, Ma’am”, as he hands them back to their distressed grandmother.
During a horror storm that killed at least 92 last weekend and destroyed hundreds of properties, the childrens’ grandmother Clara Lutz on Friday said a prayer and hid 15-month-old Kaden and three-month-old Dallas with a blanket, a pillow and a Bible in the bathtub just before it was ripped out of the ground, Lutz told an American news channel, WFIE-TV.
Then the house started shaking. “Next thing I knew, the tub had lifted and it was out of my hands,” Lutz said. “I couldn’t hold on. I just – oh my God.”
Lutz was hit in the back of the head by the water tank from the tub. Her house was stripped to the foundation. She said she looked everywhere in the wreckage for the children. “All I could say was, ‘Lord please bring my babies back safely. Please, I beg thee.” ’The bathtub was found in her yard, she said, upside down and with the babies still alive underneath. Sheriff’s officers reunited her with the two children, she said. Dallas suffered a big bump on the back of his head and was taken to a Nashville hospital because his brain was bleeding, but the bleeding stopped before Lutz got to the hospital, she said.
Lutz said the parents of the children live at the north end of the county and their home was nearly untouched by the tornado. Hopkins County Sheriff Matt Sanderson said that deputies Trent Arnold and Troy Blue, along with members of the public Timmy Vannoy and Michael Crook, helped find and untangle the children from their blankets.
“Deputy Blue lifted the tub, Deputy Arnold removed the 15-month-old from the blanket, Michael Crook untangled the three-month-old and then Deputy Arnold and Michael Crook carried the children to their grandmother who was waiting in a patrol car back down the hill,” Sherriff Sanderson told the Weather Channel.