Will Murray and a camera crew were preparing to go live just north of Brisbane, Australia, on Thursday when they suddenly became part of the story.
Mr. Murray, a reporter with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, had been sent to cover serious thunderstorms and flooding in Moreton Bay along the country’s east coast, where about nine inches of rain had overwhelmed the area.
They set up in a park along a road that had been completely covered by floodwaters.
“We thought, ‘This is a perfect place to be, it looks quite dramatic for TV news,’” Mr. Murray said in an interview. “That’s what we’re all about.”
But then Mr. Murray spotted a pickup truck coming over a hill, heading straight for the flooded area. The crew had been on the scene for a little while “and we knew how deep it was,” Mr. Murray said. “We thought, ‘Oh no, he’s going to get into trouble really, really quick.’”
Within seconds, the vehicle was flooded and beginning to float. Then it started to sink.
Mr. Murray had already called emergency services for help, but it was clear that the driver was running out of time.
“So I threw off the boots — didn’t quite get to the pants and the shirt,” Mr. Murray recalled. He told his camera operator to stay on the line with emergency services. “I’ll jump in and see if I can get to this fella,” he said.
A bystander, “who walked up much more sensibly in his shorts and no shirt — much more aerodynamic for swimming,” jumped in, too, Mr. Murray said, and the two made it to the truck.
They tried opening the front door and the driver’s door. The bystander, whom the ABC identified as Daniel Hainey, tried to kick in the back window, but nothing would budge. The water was now up to the driver’s shoulders.
“It was a very serious sort of situation, and it was starting to sink further and further,” Mr. Murray said of the truck.
Mr. Murray braced his feet against the truck’s passenger side and managed to pull the door open a crack. A rush of water streaming through the door helped open it further, and “the bloke inside swam out,” Mr. Murray said.
“When it came away, it was such incredible relief because we thought we were going to watch a man drown,” he said.
When all three made it to safety, they embraced. The driver was not identified.
The area had not received so much rain “for a very long time,” Mr. Murray said. The deluge came early in the storm season, putting the region “on high alert,” he added.
The flash floods across the north and east of Australia were caused by widespread, persistent rain and thunderstorms.
On Wednesday, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology warned that heavy rain and severe thunderstorms could bring flash flooding, predicting rainfall totals of around four inches or more in some areas.
By 10 a.m. local time on Thursday, however, the rainfall totals had far exceeded the forecast. Morayfield, near the scene of the truck rescue, recorded about nine inches of rain in just six hours.
“That is a ton of rain to fall in a six-hour period anywhere in the country,” Angus Hines, a meteorologist at the bureau, said.
“That amount of wet weather will have significant impacts, particularly when it comes to flash flooding,” he added.
The driver told Mr. Murray that he had missed the road closure signs and drove straight through, unaware of the deep water covering the road. He did express regret in losing his truck, a Nissan Navara, which he had just purchased.
“He is one lucky man,” Mr. Murray said.
Mr. Murray shied away from any comparison to Clark Kent, Superman’s secret identity, and said he was just in the right place at the right time.
“I wear the glasses and he’s a journalist, I don’t have the looks,” he said with a laugh. “Two out of three ain’t bad.”
Nazaneen Ghaffar contributed reporting.
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