Dec. 29--Just two days shy of her 23rd birthday, Erin Brazzil used her cell phone to call her father to tell him goodbye.
With the phone gripped tightly to her face she told him that she wouldn't be coming home again, that she was sorry for everything bad she had ever done.
Through tears and panic, she called out "Daddy! Daddy!" as the floodwaters rose inside her car. She was trapped inside after her Nissan Altima was picked up in a surge at Boston Avenue and Hover Street and carried east.
The water was so cold it was painful. She struggled helplessly to get out after the car was set adrift and pushed by the rushing waves as the rain continued to pummel Boulder County.
"I was like, 'Daddy, Daddy, I am legitimately going to die,'" she recalled. "I was like, 'I am so sorry, Dad. I am so sorry for everything I have done to you and Mom.'"
The engine in the car failed, electrical systems stopped working, the doors were locked and pinned tight by water pressure, and she exhausted herself trying in vain to kick out a side window or the windshield as her terrified father coaxed.
She began to make her peace with herself. With God. The waters would claim her, she was sure.
Thursday
Brazzil left work at 1:53 p.m. on Sept. 12 determined to make it from southwest Longmont across the city to her babysitter's home on St. Clair Avenue to pick up her 2-year-old daughter during historic flooding. They would then set out for home in Loveland.
Rain had soaked the city, and some areas were flooding, with conditions changing moment to moment, but she waved off her boss' offer to return to the office for shelter should travel be too much to handle. No, she recalled thinking, there was no food or toiletries at the office and she needed to retrieve her daughter, Autumn.
Brazzil drove north along Airport Road until she encountered a roadblock at Rogers Road and saw other motorists were being turned back. She recalled that a volunteer directing traffic at the intersection waved her onto Rogers Road toward the city and she complied trying to devise a route to Autumn. As she approached Hover Street, Brazzil said, she stopped well shy of the intersection because the waters appeared high. As she considered her next move, a surge of water rushed the intersection and gave her no choice.
"I was losing traction. I think it was like the water met up with the lake," she said. "I had no traction. I couldn't reverse. I couldn't drive forward."
The engine revved and made a sickly sound before the car's systems failed entirely as the floodwaters began to carry the single mother away. She could not roll down windows, and the pressure from the water held the doors shut fast. She called her father in Berthoud.
"I just started to cry," she said.
The car began to take on water, initially filling only the foot well as it was pushed eastward.
Despite her apologies and declaration of certain death, Brazzil's father urged her to fight.
"You're not going to stop," she recalled him saying. "Don't you dare stop."
She secured the cell phone in the visor so she could use her hands to give herself leverage to kick at the car's windows -- at first at the impenetrable driver's side window and then the windshield.
"My foot went through, finally," Brazzil said, describing the give of the glass when she finally kicked a hole through the windshield. She tried to peel away the broken glass and cut her hands badly. Her progress stymied and she was exhausted and freezing. When she felt like giving up entirely and surrendering to the water, she thought of her daughter and kept up the fight.
She hung up with her father to continue her efforts, with a silent promise herself that she would call back with a final goodbye if she failed. In that time, he called 911 and a Longmont police dispatcher called her to try to get a location on her car to send help.
By this time, the car had settled on the shoulder of Boston Avenue near the north entrance to the Boulder County Fairground parking lot. The water seemed to rise faster once the car stopped moving.
"They were trying to keep me calm. They were asking me where I was at, exactly," she said, adding that the dispatcher said the Longmont firefighters sent out to find her couldn't see the car. She said she was near the fairground sign. "I do remember telling dispatch, 'It is so cold, so cold.' Even on the phone I think I started praying to God, telling him I am sorry."
Brazzil said she was a hard teenager to deal with and gave her parents lots of problems. Regret overwhelmed her as the water got higher and higher. She was on her knees on the passenger seat to give her head as much clearance as possible. The water passed her waist, stomach, chest, neck, and was now up to her chin. She tilted her head back to keep her mouth and nose out of the water and tucked the phone into the visor to try to keep it try and in touch with dispatch for as long as possible.
Then she saw them.
Heroes
In the gray distance and through the rain, Brazzil could see Longmont Fire Engine No. 5.
She told the dispatcher should could see them, pressed end on the call, and the phone fell into the water.
She couldn't hear the firefighters and they could not hear her.
"At this point, I am like, they are not going to make it in time," she said. She was trained as an EMT and knew emergency processes. "I am going to drown, I am going to have to taste that nasty water."
She said she considered the death seriously and how to hasten a drowning.
"If they don't get to you in time you need to relax and let your lungs fill with the water," she said.
Her body ached with cold, especially along her abdomen where she had recently had surgery. "The pain, it was unbelievable," she said.
Nearby, Lt. Mike Becker and other Longmont firefighters found her car, but they were on Boston Avenue west of her car and separated by a yawning rush of floodwaters.
"You could just barely see the top of the car," Becker said. The windshield was broken.
Longmont did not have a boat or any other safe way to reach her, so firefighters were planning to wade out to her. Then Mountain View Fire Rescue, dispatched to the area to help search submerged cars in the parking lot, showed up.
"That is when the real heroes showed up with their Jet Ski," Becker said of Mountain View.
Mountain View Chief Mike Lee said they did not know that Brazzil was trapped and happened upon her in their initial search of the area. They saw her hand pressed against the windshield and immediately diverted to try to reach her. Communication between the teams on scene was rough, they said.
Three Mountain View firefighters -- Chad Rademacher, Steve Tallman and Steven Knoll -- "bobbed out" to her car. Initially they tried to open a door, which remained solidly shut in the pressure from the waters. Then they climbed onto the hood and pulled away the windshield with their hands, they said.
"She was upset, but for the conditions she was doing really well," Rademacher said.
Brazzil remembers the firefighters removing the windshield, but doesn't recall helping herself onto the Jet Ski, that Mountain View Firefighter James Wood rode out to her.
"You had a death grip on me," he joked with her on Dec. 18, when the firefighters and the woman whose life they saved met again.
She was taken to Longmont's engine. No ambulances were available on that day, so firefighter Nathan Rea wrapped her in his bunker gear to try to warm her and they loaded her in the engine to go to Longmont United Hospital, where she was treated for hypothermia and reunited with her father and daughter.
Rae told her she passed out soon after being loaded into the engine.
The other rescuers had to move on. The flooding meant they hopped call to call to call, often never finding out what happened to those they helped.
"Some of us were walking away and we were talking," Rademacher said. "This is why we do this."
Changed
Brazzil, now 23, has changed.
She awoke in the hospital, still wet, warming, and broken glass speckling her hair.
"It was just miraculous," she said. "It was just miraculous."
She said she is more grateful and more devout. She is particularly grateful for the firefighters who fought to save her.
"Have faith in public servants," she said. "They are always there for you, no matter the conditions."
She also said each person should be grateful and value themselves.
"You never know when it could be your time," she said. "Even if you think it is your time you need to fight, because the world needs you."
Pierrette J. Shields can be reached at 303-684-5273 or at [email protected].
Copyright 2013 - Daily Times-Call, Longmont, Colo.
