Watch: Bus Driver’s Quick Thinking Saves Her Passengers as Disaster Strikes
Rosa Amonte has worked with the NYC transit system for eight years. She knows the city and her bus well, and that knowledge came in very handy last week when the road suddenly turned into a river. On Wednesday night…
Rosa Amonte has worked with the NYC transit system for eight years. She knows the city and her bus well, and that knowledge came in very handy last week when the road suddenly turned into a river.
On Wednesday night, Amonte was driving three passengers along Queens Boulevard when the water level suddenly jumped to several feet deep, leaving her with a tough decision to make.
But the bus driver only had one goal, one thought in her mind: to plow through the water and get to the road ahead.
“I couldn’t go back,” Amonte told CNN. “I couldn’t stay there, I mean … the only decision I can take in the moment was go over it, I mean, past Queens Boulevard.
“I am shaking. I was really, really nervous, because I didn’t know what was going to happen, like, the bus going to break down? I was really, really nervous.”
But she concentrated on getting her passengers to safety, and somehow she managed to get the bus out of the deep waterway and onto visible road again.
She was so focused that she didn’t notice her three passengers were standing on the bus seats to avoid the water that sloshed into the vehicle.
Joe English, one of the passengers, had left the US Open tennis tournament early with his girlfriend when they got the flood warning.