Firefighters deliver vital medicine to Woodbine home

A crew from Woodbine Search and Rescue was called upon Tuesday morning to help a woman trapped by the floodwaters by delivering her insulin to her.

Woodbine firefighters used the department’s rescue boat Tuesday morning to deliver needed insulin to a woman unable to reach her pharmacy because of the flooded roads.

Woodbine Battalion Chief Rickie Fore said firefighters used the department’s flat bottom boat to make the mile-long trek through the waters along Ky. 779 in the Rockholds community.

Fore said the six-person crew drove to the area near Bunch’s Store where they put the boat into the water.

“There was about five feet of water standing over the road beyond that,” Fore said.

The woman, whose name was not released, had contacted the Whitley County Sheriff’s Department after she had almost ran out of the medicine used to treat diabetes.

“She was down to her last little bit,” Fore said.

From there she contacted Whitley County dispatch, which then contacted Whitley County Emergency Management Director Danny Moses about the situation.

Moses went to a pharmacy in Williamsburg where the woman’s medication was waiting, and then met up with Fore about 11 a.m. Tuesday.

“She drove down the road to where the flood water began to meet us,” Fore said.

Fore said that in 2017, Woodbine Search and Rescue was called to use its boat to bring a man suffering chest pains across a flooded area to a waiting ambulance.

Moses said while it is the first time in recent years that he remembers emergency personnel being called to deliver medication to residents trapped by flood waters, such calls frequently come in during bad snow storms.