On Friday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani paid tribute to one of New York’s heroic firefighters, who courageously rescued a Brooklyn public school principal during the city’s first major flash flood of the year.
Travis Langan, an off-duty firefighter from Ladder 123 in Crown Heights, was commended for his quick-thinking response that saved Carmen Pinto. Pinto found herself trapped in her Tesla Model 3 when it malfunctioned amid the rapidly rising floodwaters.
“She tried everything,” Mayor Mamdani recounted at a ceremony held at FDNY headquarters in Brooklyn. “She attempted to open her car door, lower her windows, and even called 911, but help wasn’t coming quickly enough.”
That evening, the city was deluged with two inches of rain in under an hour. As Langan was making his way home via the Jackie Robinson Parkway, he noticed several cars, including Pinto’s, nearly submerged in the flood.
While on the phone with his father, Langan immediately ended the call and sprang into action, determined to guide those in peril to safety.
A bystander then pointed out Pinto, whose face was pressed up against the sunroof of her vehicle as she was rapidly running out of room to breathe.
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“I just started punching my way through. And I got a big enough hole,” Langan recalled.
“She actually handed me this Yeti cup. And I just started wailing away at the sunroof with the Yeti cup,” he said.
“I started ripping the glass. And I’m able to get her head through. And I’m just very grateful that she came out alive.”
The press conference at the fire department’s MetroTech Center headquarters marked the pair’s first reunion since the harrowing experience.
“I am so happy and so blessed that I was sent an angel,” Pinto, the principal of Thaddeus Stevens Elementary in Bedford-Stuyvesant, gushed to her savior.
“Travis never thought of himself,” she said. “He could have just driven home to his pregnant wife and his beautiful daughters. But he stopped.”
A diehard New York Knicks fan, Pinto, clad in a Jalen Brunson T-shirt, joked she was grateful to be able to live to see her home team continue playing in the NBA Eastern Conference Finals, with the next game set for Saturday.
“He punched a hole in my roof and rescued me. And today I get to see the Knicks yet one more time,” she said.
“I get to go back to my school community in Bed-Stuy District 16.”
Mamdani praised Langan — who served in the US Marines — for his life of service, and the “split-second choice” that saved Pinto’s life.
“This is a man whose first instinct is to help, to protect, to serve, and to save,” the mayor said.
“On Wednesday night, he made a split-second choice. Because of his bravery, Mrs. Pinto will sit down to dinner with her family this evening.”