On Friday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani paid tribute to a heroic New York firefighter who rescued a Brooklyn school principal from a life-threatening situation during this year’s first major flash flood.
Travis Langan, an off-duty member of Ladder 123 in Crown Heights, was praised for his quick-thinking actions that saved Carmen Pinto. Pinto became trapped in her Tesla Model 3 after it malfunctioned amidst rising floodwaters.
“She tried everything—opening her car door, lowering the windows, even calling 911—but nothing was working quickly enough,” Mamdani recounted at a ceremony held at FDNY headquarters in Brooklyn.
That evening, two inches of rain inundated the city in under an hour. As Langan was driving home along the Jackie Robinson Parkway, he noticed six vehicles almost entirely submerged in water.
While on a call with his father, Langan abruptly ended the conversation to spring into action, guiding several people to safety.
A passerby then alerted him to Pinto’s dire situation. Trapped and running out of air, her face was pressed against the sunroof, a clear sign of her desperation.
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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.”
