Former Gazette journo saves life in Qld floods

BREAKING Former Euroa Gazette journalist Will Murray downed his ABC microphone in a northern Brisbane suburb on Thursday 23 October and swam out to a sinking car to rescue its driver with seconds to spare. ABC footage shows Mr Murray and bystander Daniel Hainey jumping into flood waters on a suburban street in Morayfield and swimming frantically to the fast-sinking Nissan Navara ute where they pulled the driver from the front passenger door just as the cabin went underwater. Mr Murray, who was The Euroa Gazette's journalist in 2016-17, told this masthead not long after the incident that he thought the driver of the vehicle was "not going to make it". "The front driver's door wouldn't open, so we assumed the other doors wouldn't either," Mr Murray said. "I could see that the water was shoulder level, right up to the man's chin, so we knew we didn't have very long to get him out." Mr Hainey scrambled onto the back of the ute in an attempt to break the rear windscreen, but leapt off when the car began sinking quicker. In the ABC footage, Mr Murray can then be seen swimming around to the passenger door, where both men were able to prise it open and pull the occupant out. Mr Murray was reporting on the floods that have been inundating Brisbane and did not expect to see the emergency, thinking his camera operator Liz Pickering would be filming "just another car going through water". Ms Pickering left her camera rolling and ran to the water's edge where she called emergency services. Mr Murray said before he entered the water he spoke with ambulance officers on his phone. "I said to them 'he's not going to make it, I think I'm going to have to jump in'," he said. "They told me that they didn't really encourage that sort of thing, but at that point, you kind of have no choice." He described the experience as 'very, very scary'. "I'm not mentally cut out for that," he said. "My brother is a paramedic in Sydney, so I have a whole new respect for what he does." The incident occurred at Billabongs Parkland at the intersection of Oxley Street and Appin Road. Mr Murray, whose father is former Strathbogie Shire councillor and local identity Paul Murray, said his heart rate had "finally come down in the last hour or so" and that he had visited the local Kmart to buy some new tracksuit pants. All three men are in good health.