Heroes: Meet Wildfire Super Soaker Jeff Reeves

It had become something of a joke over the years among the residents on Blue Ridge Drive, a swath of manicured suburbia carved into the scrub-brush brown canyons of Yorba Linda, California. Whenever the hot, dry, fire-fanning Santa Ana winds kicked up, which they do every fall, Jeff Reeves would go dashing off to the equipment yard of his construction company and get the 2,250-gallon water truck he uses to keep concrete moist at work sites. He'd park it in front of his house, the side sprayers and the high-pressure water cannon primed and ready to go.

"I can empty 2,250 gallons in five minutes and fill it up again five minutes after that," says Reeves, 49, a blue-collar, no-airs kind of guy, partial to sleeveless T-shirts and white plastic sunglasses. "And it only cost me $60,000. Fire engines cost half a million bucks."

Photographed by Vern Evans
Jeff Reeves in his Southern California neighborhood after the wildfires.The neighbors liked to tease him about it, but Reeves was certain they secretly felt better having the truck, with its faded American flag decals, sitting by the curb. They knew, as he did, that sooner or later one of the wildfires that whip through northern Orange County could be carried by the winds to their doorsteps.

But on the blue-sky Saturday morning of November 15, Reeves hadn't bothered to retrieve his truck. There had been fires in the region, but not close to Yorba Linda. He went to coach his youngest son's soccer team, fire the furthest thing from his mind. Finsh reading the story here...

...USD Chart....

USO is going down...

Brace yourself...

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Rays of Hope

When plastic surgeon Geoff Williams saves a face, he also saves a life. Training with Taiwanese mentors on a medical mission in Vietnam, he was astounded by the crowd that greeted them in one village: 200 mothers waiting with their children, all with cleft lips or palates. The women mobbed him, pleading for help, as he entered the local hospital. "It was as if they were in a sinking ship," Williams recalls, "and we were a lifeboat passing by." Courtesy of Geoff Williams, MD
Dr. Geoff Williams, with My Anh, a Vietnamese patient.The surgeons could operate on only 25 to 30 children during their three-day stay. The rest had to be turned away. "It was devastating," Williams says quietly. When his plane left Vietnam, he vowed to go back. You can read the rest of the article here.

BAC Bottom

The volume this week was off the charts...Rising MACD and falling price, is classic bullish divergence. The bottom is in for BAC...

Oh yeah, and for being a Bank Of America card holder, I was able to get into the Birch Acquarium at Scripps today, for free! Kids were half price. It's museum month in San Diego.

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Heroic Search and Rescue...

Arriving home after her part-time job at Burger King, Lykesia Lilly planned to shoot some hoops. It was late afternoon on a Sunday. Maybe she'd even play some one-on-one with her little nephew Adrian before supper.

But when Lilly, 18, asked her sister where the boy was, her casual question was met with concern. "I was outside looking for him because his dad and I realized we hadn't seen him in a while," recalls Adrian's mother, Stephanie Crump, 29, an insurance agent. "He was supposed to be playing at a house down the street, but when we called, he wasn't there."

In their tiny, rural community of Burnsville, North Carolina (pop. 1,644), kids still run freely from yard to yard, popping in and out of single-story brick houses with tree-lined lawns. Even traffic poses little threat. The hamlet's center consists of a single blinking caution light and two stores. But on that sunny May afternoon, six-year-old Adrian Clark seemed to have simply vanished. Much of his close and extended family joined in a frantic search, combing the neighborhood and the energetic first grader's usual play spots.

Photographed by Adam Taylor
Lykesia Lilly took a leap of faith to find her nephew, Adrian Clark.Finally, they heard faint cries coming from below a mound of rocks piled on his grandmother's lawn. "We could hear him, but we couldn't see him," recalls Lilly. "It was like he was invisible."

Following his voice, they stumbled on an abandoned well covered with landscaping shale that had been forgotten for years. Somehow Adrian had pushed the slabs aside and slipped into the ragged hole in the ground. There, down the dark, narrow shaft, they saw him-a small figure 15 feet below, suspended over water. Exhausted and shivering, he'd been clinging to pieces of craggy rock and concrete for nearly an hour.

From the lip of the well, the family tried to reassure the child. But they had no idea how to get him out. The well was only 14 inches wide at the top, "the size of a five-gallon bucket," says Crump. "We realized none of the adults could fit through it." They lowered a long orange extension cord, but Adrian-who'd slipped into the murky, freezing water three times by now-was too afraid to let go of the wall to wrap the lifeline around himself.

Fighting hysteria, Crump made two calls to 911. One reached the local volunteer fire department, and the other, the Anson County EMS dispatcher, 13 miles away. Sirens wailed across town, alerting volunteers, but Crump still worried that Adrian would lose his grip before they got there.

That's when Lilly decided she had to go down-despite her inability to swim. "Everyone was panicking and crying, and I knew I couldn't wait any longer," she recalls. "I just had to get my nephew."

Crump and Adrian's father, Dale Clark, lowered Lilly down the shaft as far as they could, then let go. The well got wider part of the way down, and she slid past her nephew and into the water below.

Fortunately, Lilly instinctively pushed off the bottom, 12 feet underwater, and surfaced just under Adrian. "I got focused," she says. "My legs are long, so I put one foot on the wall on either side of the well and held myself up." With the water level just under her nose, Lilly then bolstered her 100-pound nephew, who was shaking in his soaking clothes.

With one arm, she grabbed the cord that Adrian's father was dangling from above and tied it around Adrian's waist. "I was pushing him and holding on with my legs while they were pulling," Lilly says. "Somehow they got him out. I believe God was with us that day."

Lilly herself was pulled out just as the rescue squad arrived. "In the 20 years I've been a paramedic, we've never had to rescue a child from a well," says Anson County EMS supervisor Linda Yow, adding, "I'm amazed that this young girl had absolutely no concern for her own safety."

Both Adrian and Lilly were taken to the hospital, where he was blanketed with heat packs to ward off hypothermia and she was treated for bruises and lacerations. County workers sealed the well for good a few days later.

The next week, Crump threw a surprise party to honor the gentle-natured teen, who in the past had expressed fear of even the tamer rides at a nearby amusement park.

"I think, Lord, if my baby had drowned, if he hadn't been able to hold on …" Crump says. "I can't thank Lykesia enough." Now working in a day-care center, Lilly is hoping for a scholarship to attend the University of North Carolina, where she wants to study forensics. "She's more serious and responsible now," observes Crump. "I don't think she knew she had it in her."

Lilly and Adrian have been uniquely close since the rescue.

"He reminds me all the time," she says fondly. "He'll say, 'Thank you, Auntie, for saving me.' And he'll hug me. Just out of the blue.

"Or," she adds with a laugh, "when he wants something."