SEAGROVE, N.C. (WFMY) – Some of the most incredible stories throughout Florence’s time in the Carolinas have been the rescues.
But when your job is to volunteer to save lives, you don’t always consider you could also become a victim.
Even less, having such a close encounter with death while your own parents witness it.
A washed-out road in Seagrove nearly cost an off-duty volunteer firefighter his life and his brother-in-law's.
On their way back to a milkshake-run in Asheboro, Chase Reed and Kevin McKelvey drove on Clyde King Road to get to their destination.
But their return wouldn’t run as smoothly.
Chase’s mom, Angie Reed, was visiting the Seagrove Fire Department to check in on her son and his colleagues when a NCDOT worker came by alerting them that Clyde King Road was flooded.
“I instantly text my son, “Chase don't go Clyde King to Ridge road go back to 705,” and it was too late,” Reed said.
His brother-in-law’s car got stuck in a failed culvert where the creek had spilled into the road.
“We didn't see the water and before we know it, it was up to the doors in water and almost waist deep,” Chase recalled.
The men called 911. Chase’s mother was still at the fire station and heard the call come in.
“I was praying, “Oh, please don’t let that be my son,” and the next thing that I hear that it’s Chase Reed,” Reed shared. “That’s my son, so I take off out the door.”
Her motherly instinct kicked in and she called her husband to rush to the fire department.
“Chase is stuck in the car on the bridge,” she recalls telling him.
Water was rushing into the car as Chase’s fellow firefighters and his parents feared the worst.
“I'm gonna lose my son and my son in law,” Reed said she thought. “My grandkids aren't gonna grow up with a dad.”
Chase’s father, an Army veteran, immediately switched into survival-mode and got the men out of the car.
Just seconds later, the bridge collapsed.
“The car went and the road washed out from under the car,” Chase said. “I was like, “Well, that could have been us, but we got out in time, thank God.”
Reed says the lesson they all learned: “If you see water going across the road do not go through it, do not because you don’t know if there is a road there.”
The next day, Reed, her son-in-law and other family members found the car about half a mile downstream from where it all happened.
“I was just extremely thankful, but in disbelief that I actually saw something like the stuff you only see on the news,” the mother said. “You don’t think it’s going to happen to you and you don’t think it’s going to happen in your town—but, yeah, it does.”
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