Weatherman stops live broadcast to help woman stuck in submerged car

A weatherman took matters into his own hands after he paused his live TV broadcast on Hurricane Helene to rescue a woman who was trapped in her car due to the treacherous conditions.

Bob Van Dillen, a Fox Weather meteorologist had been reporting on the storm which was a Category 4 hurricane when it made landfall in Florida on Thursday (September 26).

During the broadcast near a flooded Peachtree Creek in Atlanta, Georgia - which has seen up to 23 feet in water - Van Dillen heard the woman's cries for help from her car.

“You can see right here we’ve got this lady that drove into the area that’s flooded out and she’s screaming right now,” he explained to the Fox & Friends studio hosts at the time.

The reporter then informed viewers that he had rang 911 and the fire department was on its way to help, which he also relayed to the woman to reassure her.

But then Van Dillen decided to see if he could do more to help as he cut his broadcast short and said: "I'm going to go see if I can help this lady out a little bit more. You guys. I'll be back."

In the next clip, it cuts to the meteorologist wadding through the water (which was up to his chest) as he carried the woman on his back to safety.

After the rescue, Van Dillen appeared on Fox & Friends again to recall why he sprung into action.

“I called 911, it was five minutes, 10 minutes — and you could hear her screaming right? You could hear it through my live shot, real loud," he explained.

Instead of waiting, he then decided to do something and described the woman's condition once he was able to get to her inside her car.

"She was panicking. She really wasn’t making too much sense, and she was still strapped into her car seat,” Van Dillen told Fox & Friends.

“She still had the seat buckle on, and she had her window about this much down and she’s trying to talk to me through that. So I’m trying to open up the door, Ainsley, and the water pressure wasn’t allowing me to do it.

"So I said, ‘Roll your window down.’ So she rolls it down and … it allowed me to open the door. … The battery is still alive and kicking in that car. In fact, I think the engine is still on … the water itself is relatively warm. The water temperature is about 80 degrees.”

Then by some "miracle" the water didn’t short circuit the boards which meant that the woman could roll down her window which made things easier.

“That allowed the pressure to be equalized and allowed me to pry the door open, unbuckle her seatbelt, put her on me, in my side,” he explained. “It was good to go.”

So far, up to 45 people have died and millions have been left without power as a result of Hurricane Helene, which has since been downgraded to a tropical storm.

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