‘I knew if the water was high, I’d get calls to rescue’

Kyle Cervenka (top right) with rescue partners in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.

When Kyle Cervenka left work that Friday, he picked up his airboat and hauled it to his home in El Lago. Hurricane Harvey was coming, so he wanted to be prepared.

“I’ve owned airboats for years. I do a lot of flounder gigging, bow fishing and duck hunting out of the custom built boat I have now,” said Kyle, 47, who grew up in Baytown. “I knew if the rain was bad and the water was high, I’d get calls to help rescue.”

The first call came about 1:30 Sunday morning.

Kyle loaded up and headed out with a friend to the I-45 feeder road not far from his home, where they made 17 rescues.

That was just the tip of the iceberg.

“We ran hard for seven straight days before my airboat just couldn’t take it anymore. I’d say that my buddies and I picked up between 600 and 700 people total,” said Kyle, who worked alongside friends Jimmy Keyes, Jason Koehn and Josh Tauber.

Their areas of focus shifted as the calls came in.

They made lots of rescues in Dickinson, where the water quickly rose to dangerous levels.

“When we got there, it was probably chest deep in places. Before we left, it was on rooftops. We were picking up kids out of second story windows and off rooftops,” Kyle said.

They headed over to Highway 90 at Tidwell, in the C.E. King area, to help move a lot more people to safe locations.

As the week progressed, they found themselves farther from home in Port Arthur. Their main mission was to help evacuate nursing homes.

Kyle Cervenka carries a young girl to safety.

“Lake Arthur Place is where we worked the most. Most of the people we picked up there were 100 percent bedridden. We were able to load their whole beds on the front of my boat,” Kyle said.

“We actually transported one lady who needed care all the way to a hospital. I drove my airboat right up to the hospital entrance on concrete. It was pretty crazy.”

Helping those elderly patients really touched Kyle’s heart.

“Because my parents are older, all I could think about was what if my mother was in a situation like that,” he said.

Another rescue that stays with Kyle was when they assisted a Marine veteran who recently had open-heart surgery.

“He still had the staples in him. To get him to higher ground was pretty moving. It kind of makes me tear up even now thinking about it,” he said.

When fuel was an issue to keep the airboat running, Kyle posted calls for help on Facebook. It wasn’t long before people stepped up to the challenge.

“They would meet us with 5- or 6-gallon cans full of gas. Those donations kept us going when we couldn’t find fuel at service stations,” he said.

Kyle Cervenka and his buddies rescued people after Hurricane Harvey.

Kyle credits his close friends for working together as a team to save so many people during the week. They were all tired, but they kept on going.

In addition to rescuing people, they helped one of Kyle’s hunting buddies by delivering hay and range cubes to some hungry stranded cattle.

Because of all the devastation and the emotions stirred up by Hurricane Harvey, Kyle admits to having a few bad dreams in the days following their work. While returning to his regular job as a sales manager for a construction company was challenging at first, he’s “getting back in the groove” now.

“I’m back up and going strong this week,” he said. “I’m glad to be back at work, back to a more normal routine.”