LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Louisville firefighter Bryce Carden's coming off a whirlwind of a weekend after that Second Street Bridge rescue Friday. A multi-car crash sent a Sysco semi over the bridge, with the driver still inside the cab.
It was a once in a lifetime rescue, as his chief put it.
Now, Carden said he's ready to go back to just being a firefighter after these last few days of fame.
"It's been a wild few days," Carden said. "My phone has finally stopped ringing and calmed down just a little bit."
Carden said he just happened to be in position Friday for the rescue that captured the nation.
"I had to get my mind right that I was going to be the guy to go down," he said.
Strapped to a rope anchored by a ladder truck, Carden was lowered over the bridge some 100 feet over the Ohio River.
"Rope rescues are not fast, you know," Carden said. "And for us to get it done as quick as we did, it just shows how efficient we really are."
Most of Louisville watched live as Carden handed a harness to the driver of the Sysco truck, Sydney Thomas, who was still strapped into her seatbelt.
"I had a free pocket knife from LG&E training last year. You know that slow motion feeling of, I need a pocket knife, and I look down at my pocket and I was like, thank God, you know? Like that saved the whole rescue," Carden said. "I was like, 'Hey honey, stay right there,' and I was able to cut the seatbelt off of her and get her out."
First responders waited from above and below as Carden and the military veteran worked to secure themselves to each other.
"I was like, Are you a praying woman? And she was like, 'Yeah.' I said, 'alright, well, let's pray together.'"
Anything was possible at this point.
"We could survive [a fall]. But you got to think she's still in the 18-wheeler and I'm attached to her. So, we would have went down with 18-wheeler and the weight of that would have broke that ladder," Carden said.
Then came the moment Thomas was lifted out of the cab.
"Her foot was still on the brake," Carden said. "So, when she let off the brake, it let out you know, how air brakes work. It makes a big loud noise. I think everybody's heart dropped on scene for a moment. That's definitely something that we were all like, oh man! It gave us a little bit of a scare."
They weren't the only ones. Carden's wife was home with the baby watching this unfold, with the rest of the world. She'd only received a short text from Carden before he'd left the station: "There's a semi over the bridge. Here we go." And then he forgot his phone at the firehouse.
"She was watching it live, not knowing it was me," Carden said. "And literally, as I got down to the victim, they text her. She's feeding our 16-month-old daughter, and she said that she about just dropped the bottle." He laughed as he said it.
Forty minutes into the rescue, a collective sigh of relief as both Carden and Thomas were lowered onto the bridge.
"I's not one person that makes the department you know," Carden said. "We all come together collectively to run as a well-oiled machine, and that's what we do. It takes a lot of courage. But like I said, we're here to serve the people and if we had a, another run come out for a car dangling off the bridge we'd do it again tomorrow, and probably do it exactly the same way."
"It was a big puzzle. I was just a small piece."
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