When the call went out for help evacuating flood stricken residents during Tropical Storm Harvey, Eric “Sarge” Charon answered.

Charon, a security monitor at Thomas Jefferson Middle School, added his name to the volunteer list and spent about 32 hours straight driving a school bus through high water and bringing people to a safe haven.

“I got the call from the transportation department who asked me if I was available because they needed people to drive buses to bring people to the civic center,” Charon said of the Aug. 29 phone call. “I told them, ‘yes, I’m available.’”

The busloads of residents arrived at the Robert A. “Bob” Bowers Civic Center but the water kept rising during the historic flooding.

“I ended up stuck in flood water with kids and women,” he said. “I had to call the transportation department and had a tow truck pull me out. Then I started bringing them to the (Carl) Parker Center. By then I was the only bus driver out, the others were stuck at the civic center. I started transporting as many as I could.”

At some point the temporary shelter at the civic center flooded as well and plans quickly came together to bring those, and other flood victims, to the Parker Center.

City workers operating dump trucks were brought in to help in the rescues that went on throughout the night. When the Parker Center became full Charon began bringing people to Port Arthur Early College High School, formerly known as Woodrow Wilson School.

“I thought we were about to get a break then we heard, no, we need you to go back to Woodrow and start transporting them to Thomas Jefferson,” he said. “By then we had some help, some city buses were available. It took all night to go from there to TJ.”

Things finally began to slow down for rescuers. Charon’s supervisor caught up with him — she had been stuck in the civic center — and said he needed to get some rest.

“I hadn’t had sleep in two or three days,” he said. “I got me about three hours sleep, got back up and started again by bringing people to the airport so they could go to Dallas.”

All in all Charon spent about 50 hours carrying about 800 people to shelters and later the airport.

“It was rough,” he said. “What I tell everybody is that I was on the front lines. I was there from the beginning to the end. I was there.”

During the worst parts of the flooding buses couldn’t reach those in need of help. Even the Port Arthur Fire Department lost several trucks and the school district lost three buses, he said.

“For some reason my bus kept going,” he said. “There were certain places that I couldn’t go in. That’s where people in boats would go in then drop them off to me and I’d bring them to the designated area. We kept going back and forth like that.”

Charon shared a photo taken of him carrying a woman to his bus at the middle school. The woman, he said, was using a walker to make the distance from the school to the bus for the ride to the airport and then on to a shelter in Dallas. He asked her if it was OK if he carried her and she said yes.

Through it all he had help from his 12-year-old son William Charon.

“My boy was there through the whole thing,” he said. “He helped load people on the bus, their pets, their clothes. He helped the elderly. When I got three hours sleep, he got three hours sleep. I didn’t ask him to help. I just put him on the bus — I wasn’t going to leave him alone in the storm.”

Charon made it through many hours of water rescues while skillfully maneuvering a school bus through flooded streets.

“At the end I just broke down and stared crying; it was so depressing,” he said. “My son said ‘dad why are you crying?’ I told him it’s just sad – seeing people jump off the bus, babies being loaded in the rain. People walking in waist deep water.”

Would he do it all over again?

“Yes, I would,” he said.