From People Magazine Heroes Among Us:

PARAMEDIC TERRY HOBEN, 37
In a hurricane's wake, he ferries neighbors to safety

After wrapping up a brutal 17-hour shift Sept. 17 at a hospital in Newark, N.J., paramedic Terry Hoben thought he'd take a look at what Hurricane Floyd had left behind before he headed home. Entering downtown Bound Brook, where he lives with his wife, Sally, 45, and their two children, Hoben found chaos. Floodwaters from the Raritan River had risen more than 10 feet on Main Street, inundating homes, shorting out power lines and setting off fires. "It was hysteria at that point," recalls Hoben. "There were fire trucks running all over the place, state police were arriving with boats, 10 to 12 feet of water." And the water was still rising.

Spotting a friend, police Lt. Steven Cozza, Hoben asked how he could help. Cozza urged him to get home as fast as he could, put his fishing boat into the water and start emptying houses. Soon after, in the 16-foot skiff he had left parked on a trailer in his driveway, Hoben teamed up with officer Diana Paczkowski and pushed off into the eerie landscape of half-submerged buildings in search of stranded residents. "You put 16 feet of water on an area you usually walk around, and you can't recognize a thing," says Hoben. "We were scared to death." Adds Paczkowski, 29: "I'm not an avid water lover, first of all."

Navigating fast-running murky waters where familiar streets once lay, the two were soon hard at work. Taking aboard babies and children first, they plucked whole families from upper floors, attics and even rooftops where they had sought safety. Hoben sometimes entered a house where residents had been reluctant to leave or were waiting for the waters to subside. But water wasn't the only worry. The floods had risen to the point that Hoben and his passengers had to duck beneath high-voltage power lines, some of them still surging with current. And in one area a gas main had broken. Hoben carefully eased his boat along, hoping nothing would set off the potentially lethal fumes. "A mistake could not just have cost my life or Diana's, but the 8 or 10 people in the boat," he explains.

He and Paczkowski made nearly 50 trips over 13 hours, taking people to safety. Mary Anne Baloy, 42, remembers him well. She, her husband, Roger, 39, and their three children thought they could wait out the flood. Then it rose to their first-floor ceiling and kept on climbing. In the distance, she says, "you heard people screaming." When Hoben and another team of rescuers arrived, he lifted Baloy's kids into his boat. "It was incredible what they did," she says. "I have no idea how to repay them." But Hoben says he was just one of many residents and police officers who helped that night. "My town was in trouble," he says. "And this disaster pulled this community together."