'His friends call him Chainsaw': Former South Dakotan saves 3 lives during Hurricane Ian
A former South Dakotan now living in Florida lost the sailboat he lives on as Hurricane Ian tore through Fort Myers — but not before he managed to use it to save the lives of three people.
"His friends call him Chainsaw," CNN reporter Jim Acosta said as he introduced Doug McGill during a segment on Sunday, where the two men stood among the wreckage the hurricane had brought upon the city.
McGill said he was one of the last two boats standing in the area when he decided to cut himself loose from the pier amidst 12-14 foot storm surges.
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Nearby, three men were trying to get out of a second-story window of a building that was nearly underwater, and had managed to crawl onto a nearby dinghy.
That’s when McGill showed up — “not by choice,” he joked. And it was good timing, he said. “Where they were at is totally gone. Not a thing.”
As McGill speaks, CNN’s cameras show his sailboat, the Valkyrie, lying on its side in the middle of the road.
“I lost my boat, I lost everything I had, but saved three guys,” McGill said. “It was worth it.”
Near the end of the interview, Acosta asked McGill if he’d ever been through something like this before, to which he replied that he was only eight miles away when a tornado leveled Spencer, South Dakota on May 30, 1998, and that his son had been even closer to the storm.
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“This was worse,” McGill told Acosta. “This was worse.”
'Catastrophe'
In an interview with the Argus Leader, McGill said the only word to describe what he'd gone through was "catastrophe." He couldn't see more than 40 feet in front of him for hours, and compared putting your hand outside to getting shot by a BB gun.
McGill, who lived in South Dakota from 1993 to 2009, said he's seen other hurricanes while serving in the Navy, watched the Spencer tornado lay trees down and worked as a state corrections officer. He's seen some stuff, in other words. But Ian was different.
"It was really bad," McGill said of the first half of the storm. "Then it got worse."
Even still, his sailboat was likely salvageable, he said. There was some engine trouble, and the fact that it was in the middle of the road, but those are fixable.
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But as crews tried to move the boat so that emergency vehicles could get through, McGill said, the front of the boat was ripped entirely off.
McGill’s son, Eric, still lives in South Dakota, and can't drop everything to travel nearly 2,000 miles. So to help his father, he's started a GoFundMe, which has already raised $3,060 of its $10,000 goal. Eric McGill wrote on the site that in addition to the loss of the sailboat, McGill’s motorcycle, his only mode of transportation, was also found destroyed blocks away from his home.
The response has been incredible, he said. "You don't know the compassion that's around you."
Doug McGill agreed, saying he was amazed by people's kindness, as well as thanking his son for doing it, calling him "an exceptional individual."
As for that nickname? It came from his actions during another storm, when he grabbed a chainsaw and started cutting stuff up. A woman called him "Chainsaw," and the name stuck, his son said. "Help somebody, figure it out later," he said — that's Chainsaw.
So as Chainsaw figures out how to recover from the storm, Eric McGill is glad that he was in the right place at the right time. And that he's the kind of person who's always looking to help.
“It makes me feel good about the guy that’s my dad," McGill said.
This article originally appeared on Sioux Falls Argus Leader: Former South Dakotan saves three lives during Hurricane Ian
