Will Murray, 28, has spoken out about pulling a man from a sinking truck during a live broadcast in Queensland.
The ABC journalist was covering heavy rainfall across the Brisbane region last Thursday when a four-wheel-drive entered floodwaters in Morayfield and stalled. Murray, who was on assignment for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, watched the vehicle begin to float downstream and immediately called emergency services before making a split-second decision to enter the water himself.
“I saw him drive in and immediately his car started floating downstream,” Murray recounted. “Initially I could see him, but he disappeared from my sight within seconds, so I made the call to jump in.”
Bystander Daniel Hainey independently reached the same conclusion. “The car began to slowly sink deeper and deeper, and that’s when I thought, ‘Oh no, this is not looking good’, so I started swimming in there,” Hainey told the news station.
Murray handed his phone to camera operator Liz Pickering and swam through what he described as “deep” waters alongside Hainey. The two men reached the truck and attempted the nearest door without success, then moved to the rear of the vehicle with plans to break the back window.
“I thought to try the passenger side rear door first and put my feet against the car and pulled as hard as I could and with some luck the door swung open,” Murray said.
The reporter speculated that water flooding into the cabin “helped create some pressure to force the door open.” The driver was pulled free moments before the truck vanished beneath the surface.
“All three of us gave each other a big hug and were just so relieved,” Murray recalled. “It was very scary, but happy everyone is safe and relieved it is OK.”
Pickering, who filmed the entire rescue, noted afterward that “the pair of them definitely saved that man’s life.”
The rescued man told Murray he had not seen warning signage and misjudged the depth when he drove through at speed. Murray later relayed the driver’s explanation on national television, using the near-fatal incident to deliver a direct warning to viewers.
“I had no idea how deep it was and that’s the lesson we keep hearing, isn’t it, that you can’t tell and you really couldn’t,” Murray said to the Australian outlet. “It didn’t look particularly severe. But as you can see in the vision, the car completely disappears. It’s clearly very deep in the middle there.”
The journalist, who called the ordeal “terrifying,” made his plea plain: “Please don’t drive into floodwaters.”
More than six inches of rain had fallen that morning across the region, creating dangerous conditions that Murray said deteriorated faster than appearances suggested. Having witnessed firsthand how rapidly the situation turned life-threatening, he emphasized that visual assessments of floodwater depth are routinely misleading.