Schools, state offices closing early due to weather
February 23, 2016
Nicholls’ financial chief resigns
February 25, 2016
It’s easy to forget sometimes, being as close to so many meandering bodies of water as we are, how easy it is for a wrong turn of the wheel, a swerve because of a cat, or any number of circumstances to end up with a car that was on the road splashing into a bayou or canal.
Sometimes this works out OK and the people don’t get hurt, and sometimes the episodes are with tragedy.
For things to have a better outcome sometimes it takes people, all working together, for lives to be saved. A lot of times these better outcomes don’t make it into the newspapers, although more and more we read about them in social networking, which has taken over for all of us as the replacement for the picket fences we once leaned over for conversations containing news and gossip of the non-headline variety.
Some of the details in this story are missing, but there are enough to tell the tale, which is something that happened the Friday before Mardi Gras, late at night, in Chauvin.
Russell Portier is a diver by trade, and makes a living on a freelance basis, using guts and ability to enter a hostile environment, which is the water, and free ropes or cables from somebody’s propeller, or performs other tasks that require his special set of skills.
A soft-spoken guy of 21, Russell is well rounded. In the picture shown here he is wearing a suit, because he was going to a field party at the Superdome a while back. But he wasn’t wearing a suit the night of Feb. 5, when he had returned home to Bayouside Drive after a routine visit to a friend.
Russell was just putting the key in his door when he heard some loud noise, and then a splash, and then there were the screams of these two women who had been in a car that traveled on the road but then made its way smack into Bayou Petit Caillou. It didn’t take long for the car to sink, and there was Russell rushing to the two women, trying to help.
“This lady was hollering,” recalled Russell, who feared that someone else might have been in the submerged auto. So off came the pants and the shirt and there went Russell, into the water, and when he figured out nobody was left inside the car, he helped get the women to shore.
The water was cold.
Russell doesn’t talk much about his heroics, which he doesn’t think are heroics at all. Like most people who do heroic things, he just kind of takes it in stride. The whole operation was kind of a family affair, actually. Russell’s sister, Buffy Domangue, owns Jimmy’s Towing, which got dispatched to the scene. Two tow trucks were required to get the Ford Explorer out of the water and Russell’s cousin, Jody Domangue, went and got his aluminum boat, which he used to get the hooks out to the car. So everybody got kind of cold. It should be noted that for all this work the Domangues aren’t getting paid, since the car had no insurance and the owner, who had lent it out to the women who survived the dive, doesn’t have the money to pay. This is something that often happens to tow operators.
Russell, of course, wasn’t required to be involved. But word has traveled up and down Bayou Petit Caillou of his heroics.
“He is a good kid,” is how his proud sister-in-law, Angela Portier, sums it all up. “He is a Portier so there are no ifs, ands or buts if he would help somebody. He thought he was about to drown, it was so cold ”
There’s a lot more good news that comes out of these bayou communities on a fairly regular basis, though not always this dramatic. And it’s nice to have a chance to share one when it comes along. •
