Mom, young son cling to tree as rains flood Butler County

Cassandra Phillips pulled her 3-year-old son out of his car seat as their minivan was swept into a deep, rushing flash flood south of Rose Hill.

For the next hour, she clung to a tree limb with one leg, held Ethan in the crook of an arm and talked to emergency dispatchers on her cellphone as the rain poured down Friday night and the rushing water roared underneath them.

When rescuers at last reached them, her leg, with her circulation cut off for an hour, no longer worked. They had to carry her to a nearby ambulance.

Phillips, 32, is a National Guard soldier with the 137th Transportation Company, based in Topeka. She’s also a stay-at-home mom in Burlington, in eastern Kansas, with her husband and three children, she said.

This night was terrifying, she said. The limb she clung to was weak, only about 2 1/2 inches in diameter, and she could hear it cracking – and slowly fracturing – in the crook of her leg.

“We’re not lucky,” Phillips said. “We’re blessed. We’re blessed.”

She did not mean to drive into a flood, she said. At about 10 p.m., she was coming north out of Udall, several miles south of Rose Hill. The light was so dim from the night rain on the rural stretch of highway that “all I could see were the white lines of the road.”

“And then my van was taken.”

As the van floated into the trees on the east side of Butler Road, she gathered herself, pushed the button to lower the van windows, then turned and jumped into the back seat, where Ethan was strapped into his car seat. “I got him out of the seat,” she said. “I called 911 dispatchers. And then the van went right into the tree.”

With water rushing all around them, she stuffed her phone into her bra, with the line still open to the dispatchers. She held on to Ethan, climbed out of the van and onto a small branch of the tree.

She twisted herself into a sitting position on top of the limb, held it tight with her right leg, told Ethan to hold on to her neck with both arms, then stuck one arm behind her to hold on to the tree. With the other hand, she pulled her phone out of her bra and resumed talking to 911 dispatchers.

“For a while there, I was pretty scared about anyone finding us,” she said.

“I could talk to the dispatchers, but I didn’t know where we were. I finally told them ‘I can see another car out there. If you have anybody out here, tell them to flash their lights on and off.’ ”

When rescuers at last found her and shined flashlights on her, they shouted to her that the rushing water was too dangerous, they couldn’t get to her. For the harrowing minutes that followed, she held on, with the branch cracking and bending beneath her. When it cracked loudly, she’d yell at the rescuers that the branch might be giving way.

At last they put a boat into the water and reached her. They floated her back to the road. Her leg no longer worked from having her blood circulation cut off for an hour; one of the rescuers carried her and placed her in the ambulance.

On Saturday, when she met a tow truck driver to haul away her minivan, she was still limping. She fell trying to climb the road embankment. “I rolled my ankle,” she said. “I’m heading to an emergency room now.” She could not walk.

She later sent a message about the emergency crews who saved her. “Words are not enough; they seem too small compared with what they did for us,” she said.

Doctors determined her leg had nerve damage from the loss of circulation and that her ankle was badly sprained, she said. The ankle and the nerve damage will heal over time, they told her.

Twelve hours after she almost drowned, Phillips and her son had not yet left the scene; they waited, sitting in a friend’s car, until a tow truck hauled her van away from where they’d spent the night. She made the tow truck driver wait while her friend went through the flooded van until she found Phillips’ wallet.

Lt. Tim Follis of the Augusta Department of Public Safety was one of the rescuers who found them and pulled them to safety.

“That little boy is special, just a good little kid,” Follis said. “We got him into the back of the vehicle. He was so young, I don’t know that he actually knew what he’d just been through. But then we looked in on him, and asked, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ and he said. ‘I’m bwave! (brave).’ ”

Asked about this Saturday, Ethan nodded and smiled as Phillips held him in her arms.

“I was bwave,” he said.

This story was originally published August 20, 2016 at 2:40 PM with the headline "Mom, young son cling to tree as rains flood Butler County."