A Coast Guard rescue swimmer is already being hailed as an “American hero” after his very first mission — helping to save the lives of 165 Texas flash-flood victims.
“This is what it’s all about, right? Like, this is why we do the job,” said Scott Ruskan, 26, a New Jersey native and former KPMG accountant, to The Post after his work in central Texas.
“This is why we take those risks all time. This is why like Coast Guard men and women, are risking their lives every day,” said Petty Officer Ruskan — who was in charge of triage at Camp Mystic, the Christian girls’ summer camp that saw some of the worst of the flooding.
Raised in Oxford, NJ, Ruskan enlisted in the US Coast Guard in 2021, and after completing basic training, went to Aviation Survival Technician school in Petaluma, Calif., before being stationed in Corpus Christi, Texas.
He had been on call since November after completing all of his training, familiarizing himself with the Coast Guard’s iconic MH-65 helicopter and enrolling in additional rescue swimming classes as he waited to be called into action.
That fateful call came on the Fourth of July as a massive summer rainstorm led to catastrophic flash flooding in the Lone Star State that has so far claimed at least 80 lives.
Bryan Winchell, a helicopter search and rescue technician with Texas Task Force 1 — a joint partnership between the Texas Army National Guard and the Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service — called the Coast Guard looking to get boots on the ground and in the air for an emergency rapid response near central Texas.
“That’s a little bit outside our area of operation normally, but people were in danger, and we’re a good asset to try and help people out, and these guys were asking for help, so that’s kind of what we do,” Ruskan said.
By 7 a.m. Friday, crews loaded into Blackhawk 60 and Coast Guard MH-65 choppers and took to the skies.
It was “literally the best aircrew we could possibly have,” Ruskan said.
Follow The Post’s coverage on the deadly Texas flooding
- Texas flood death toll hits at least 80 with beloved teacher, soccer coach and wife ID’d as latest victims
- Brothers describe horror of climbing on top bunks to escape Texas floods for 13 hours — as mom praises hero counselors
- Miracle rescue of 2 girls from Texas floods after they were found clinging 30-feet up in a tree
- Youngest girls at Camp Mystic were sleeping just feet from the river before horrific Texas floods — with 5 kids dead, 12 missing
Their destination was Camp Mystic, a Christian girls’ summer camp just off the banks of the Guadalupe River, which saw some of the worst of the flooding.
Five campers ages 8 and 9 have been confirmed dead, with a counselor and 11 more girls still missing, officials said.
When the crew arrived, they were racing against sundown to rescue as many stranded flood victims as possible. All roads were impassable, and the currents were too strong for any boats to get in, leaving helicopter evacuation as the only hope for the nearly 200 survivors.
As the crews evaluated the operational logistics, their goal was to move as many people out of harm’s way as possible, but they were bound by the weight limits of the helicopters. During a briefing, they decided to leave Ruskan on the ground to triage the rescue mission.
“I was like, sweet, sounds great, I’ll be more helpful on the ground than I will be in the air right now, so that’s kind of what we went with,” he said.
The rescuers loaded the first four to five survivors into the MH-65, and Ruskan set out to take a closer look at the scene of the camp, which was on higher ground than the flood-ravaged surrounding areas, where trees were snapped like twigs and twisted metal of cars littered the muddy ground.
While on the ground, Ruskan tended to terrified and injured campers, many of them shoeless and still wearing pajamas from their mad dash out of their bunks in the middle of the night.
In between comforting the “cold, wet and miserable” survivors, both kids and adults, Ruskan directed Army Blackhawk 60s and MH-65s to pockets of survivors to begin painstakingly bringing them to safety.
“My main job was triaging, and then my second job I kind of picked up was just trying to comfort these kids and the family members and counselors,” Ruskan said.
“I mean this is like, probably the worst day of their life. They’re in a terrible situation, they have friends and family unaccounted for, missing, unknown status, and they’re looking to me and all the rescuers for guidance and comfort.”
He said one of the hardest parts was having crying grown adults coming to him for help finding missing loved ones.
“It’s like, ‘Hey, I can’t help you guys locate these people, but I can get you guys out of here right now if we just try to remain calm,’ and just trying to comfort everyone as best I could is kind of what I was doing,” he said.
Over the next several hours, Ruskan spearheaded a high-risk rescue mission under the worst possible environmental conditions, which in the end saw 165 brought to safety.
“So we basically got the majority of the people out of Camp Mystic, which is awesome. And I feel like we did a lot of good that day, but obviously it’s still super sad,” he said. “There’s still a lot of people missing and unaccounted for, so the mission’s not over yet. It’s not over for us.
“We’re back home and stuff, but there’s still so many crews, Coast Guard, Department of Public Safety, Air National Guard and those Task Force 1 guys, as well as other local agencies. They’re still out there,” Ruskan said, eager to share the credit for him and his crew’s heroics with the other agencies involved in the rescue.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem trumpeted the successful rescue mission on social media, identifying Ruskan by name and calling him an “American hero” whose “selfless courage embodies the spirit and mission of the Coast Guard.”
But Ruskan’s reaction to her glowing praise was to share the glory with his fellow guardsmen.
“Honestly, I’m mostly just a dude. I’m just doing a job. This is what I signed up for, and I think that any single Coast Guard rescue swimmer or any single Coast Guard pilot, flight mechanic, whoever it may be, would have done the exact same thing in our situation,” he said.
“That’s what we were asked to do and we’re gonna do it. Any one of us, if anyone else was on duty that day, they would have done the same thing as us. We just happened to be the crew that got the case.”
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