A three-year-old girl has been rescued in Texas after she clung to her mother’s body for half a mile in flood waters.
The toddler was found yesterday afternoon holding on to her mother, who was floating in a canal in Beaumont, Texas, an area badly affected by Hurricane Harvey.
They had been travelling in a car which became stuck in the flood waters, according to a police report.
They got out of the car and were swept down a canal by flood waters for about half a mile before they were spotted by police officers and rescue divers and recovered from the water.
The woman was unresponsive and was pronounced dead a short time after the rescue.
Her daughter, meanwhile, was responsive but suffering from hypothermia.
The little girl is now in a stable condition.
The woman “absolutely” saved her daughter’s life, Officer Carol Riley, a spokeswoman for the Beaumont Police Department, told People Magazine.
“They were in the water for quite some time,” Riley says. “When the woman was found the baby was clinging to her. The mother did the best she could to keep her child up over the water.”
“The baby also had a backpack that was helping her float on her back and she was holding on to her mom.”
The death toll from the tropical storm, which has seen tens if thousands of people evacuated from their homes along the US gulf coast, has reached 30, reports the New York Times.
