SHOALHAVEN Ambulance Paramedic Irwin Burbage has relived an early morning rescue of a man stranded in floodwaters at Bolong, north of Bomaderry.
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Emergency services received a triple zero call for help around 3.40am on Monday to a vehicle caught in rapidly rising flood waters on Bolong Road.
The rescuers managed to make it as far north by vehicle on Bolong Road as Jennings Lane and then had to wade in through the dark to perform the rescue.
Paramedic Burbage was joined by a fellow swift water technician from the State Emergency Service and waded more than 1.5 kilometres in the dark in raging floodwaters at some stages up to their armpits to recover the man.
"He was sitting in his four-wheel drive in about waste deep water," Burbage said.
"He'd been there for about an hour and was pretty cold by the time we got to him."
The man told paramedics he was travelling to work and hadn't seen any road closed or water over the road signs before he became stranded.
"He said the first he knew of anything was just after the Broughton Creek bridge when he hit the wall of water and it sprayed everywhere," Burbage said.
"It took him some time to stop and when he tried to get back into reverse the 4WD started floating.
"He ended up about 300m further south towards Bomaderry."
"He told us he was too scared to get out due to the pace the water was moving."
Burbage said the journey in was hard as they "had no idea where the man was located".
"My SES partner had done a few of these rescues and we decided to walk in rather than paddle as we didn't really know where this guy was stuck," he said.
Burbage is 182cm tall and his partner 195cm, or six foot and six foot five respectively in the old scale, and he said they needed every bit of that height.
"It got pretty deep at times, it was up to our armpits which was pretty hairy," he said.
"We had been called to two other rescues in the same location that night but we also spotted a third car submerged we didn't know about.
"Water was lapping at the top of the roof inside.
"We checked it out and no-one was around - so it looked like a car just abandoned that fell victim to the rising floodwaters.
"It was like a graveyard for vehicles."
Burbage said when they finally reached their patient which took about 25 minutes, the man was suffering hypothermia.
"He was very cold," Burbage said.
"The water was freezing and he'd been in it for an hour. He was pretty crook when we got there.
"He couldn't really feel anything from the waist down."
At the same time another rescue crew was coming from the Shoalhaven Heads end.
"We managed to get him into the boat and using the ambulance beacon as a reference point we were able to paddle our way back out," Burbage said.
"In the end it all worked well - my SES counterpart had done heaps of such rescues, so he came up with the plan; we communicated through to the other teams and it worked well."
But the adventure hadn't finished there - rising floodwaters meant the ambulance wasn't unable to get any further than the former Papermill site, so the man was loaded into the rear of a police paddy wagon before meeting the waiting ambulance.
He was transported to Shoalhaven District Hospital for treatment for hypothermia.
"He was very lucky," Burbage said.
"He could hardly stand when we got him back to dry land.
"It was bitterly cold. Even though we had all the good wetsuits on we were cold. Your fingers and the tips of your ears and nose were freezing by the end of it."
But it wasn't only the cold they had to deal with, debris, both floating and submerged and dare we say it a fair bit of cow manure and feed was floating around in the water.