Miles Crawford was outside his Lakeview-area home Wednesday night watching Hurricane Francine sweep through town. When he saw a police officer, he assumed the water must be rising at the railroad underpass on Canal Blvd. The area frequently floods.

Then his brother sent him a text message: someone had driven into the water and was stuck under the bridge.

Crawford, a nurse in the emergency room at University Medical Center in New Orleans, wanted to see if he could help and informed the police officer and a WDSU reporter on the scene that he had medical supplies with him.

But the water was rising. Only a narrow strip of the upper part of the driver’s window was still above the water.

The officer told him it was deep and not safe. Crawford, 39, ran back to his house to get a hammer.

“I took off my boots and went in there,” Crawford said.

At this point, the water was up to his chest. He opened the rear passenger window and saw a man in the front seat with water up to his chin. Crawford told him to climb into the back seat and then pulled him out.

The entire rescue, filmed by WDSU, took less than two minutes.

Crawford then went back to his house. Later, television reporters recognized his door by the boots in front of it.

Crawford has been a nurse for four years and is currently completing a nursing residency program with a focus on mental health. Compared to that, he said, breaking the window of a submerged truck seemed like no big deal.

“Honestly, it’s easy compared to what I do on a daily basis,” Crawford said.

Francine, now a tropical storm, dumped heavy rain on the New Orleans metro for hours, causing widespread flooding in Lakeview, Mid-City, Metairie and other communities and neighborhoods.