29, 2012, from a friend who was marooned by Sandy floodwaters in an attic with his wife and infant. In Midland Beach, Staten Island, a local truck driver named Pete Vadola got a phone call on Oct. Tommy Woods of Ladder 154/Engine 307 in Jackson Heights, Queens. A year after Sandy, he's busy getting on with life, rebuilding his home and doing his job of saving lives every day as Capt. He's still slightly ticked off at me for ever telling his tale. "He's what a true hero looks like."Īfterwards, Woods was too heroed-out to blow his horn anymore about Oct. "Tommy Woods is simply heroic," Steve Buscemi, a retired FDNY firefighter who is now the star of HBO's "Boardwalk Empire," told me before presenting the award. Last week, I met Woods at the Friends of Firefighters Awards in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where he was presented with yet another award for bravery. And David Wright's Wright Thing charity honored him at a ceremony at Citi Field before a Mets game. The FDNY begged to differ, awarding him the James Gordon Bennett Medal, the department's highest honor. When I arrived after the storm, Tommy Woods, a humble guy, reluctantly recounted the events, insisting other neighbors had helped enormously in the rescues, that he was just happy his family and neighbors were safe. Father and son helped rescue people from the burning homes, including a young handicapped woman.īy morning, there were 29 people, four dogs and a parrot finding shelter in the home of Tommy Woods' brother. Then he and his then-14-year-old son Brendan jumped in a kayak and paddled back to Beach 130th St. to flames but not before rescuing his 82-year-old mother on a surfboard and steering her five blocks through dangerous floodwaters to the safety of his brother's house. ![]() 29 a firefighter named Tommy Woods lost his home on Beach 130th St. I am alive because of this man, Aiman Youssef, a quiet, heroic, beautiful man who saved over a dozen people from electrocution and drowning in Sandy. "Now I live in a shelter in Connecticut, in a trailer from funds from the Tunnel-to-Towers Run charity. "I lost my home but I got my five cats back," says Daino. Six months later, he lost his own home to an accidental fire. Truck driver Pete Vadola saved 200 neighbors in his Staten Island neighborhood with a motor boat he found during Hurricane Sandy. I lost my home, my van, my entire business inventory of electronic equipment that I sold on the Internet. "He swam into my arms, shivering, licking my face," says Youssef, 44. In the remnants of his wrecked kitchen he found Samson exhausted but alive, treading water. But at dawn I waded to my house as the live wires sparked from the toppled power poles." "I made a deal with Jesus that if he also spared Samson I would erect a tent in the lot where my house once stood and feed and clothe those like me left homeless by the storm for one full year," says Youssef. "And I was sobbing for my lost cats."Ī devout Catholic, Aiman says he'd prayed all night, thanking Jesus for sparing him and his family. ![]() "Aiman also saved his mother but he was heartbroken he'd lost his dog, Samson, in his wrecked house," says Daino. Inside the doctor's house, Daino met a dozen people whom Youssef had helped rescue from Sandy's rampage. It was like being pulled from hell into heaven." "I looped it around me, and Aiman pulled me with the strength of God out of the tree and across the water and to the safety of the high brick stoop of the doctor's house. Then Youssef, a Syrian immigrant, flung her a lasso fashioned from a 100-foot heavy-duty orange extension cord.
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