Fire engineer David Manzeck and the crew at Station 84 in Pittsburg were cooking dinner a little after 6 p.m. on Sunday, April 11. They had been out on a fire that day and were ready to kick back for the evening when the call came in.

A car had crashed through a fence on Mt. Diablo Boulevard near San Miguel in Walnut Creek and overturned in the flood channel. At least two people were in the water.

Station 84 is a water rescue operation. Manzeck and his crewmates are highly skilled and trained in techniques needed for complex rescues. Within seconds, they were en route to the scene at Bancroft and Minert Road in Concord, 2½ miles downstream from the accident. A passenger, Janet Hogan, 74, had been carried there by the fast-moving current.

Stepping into action.

Swollen with heavy rains, the 50-degree water was moving at 20 mph. The woman had gone over a 10-foot waterfall and was trapped in the “boil,” the churning water at its base. From the bank high above the channel, Manzeck could see her fighting for her life. “There was frantic in everyone’s voice when I first got there,” he says. “We could hear her yelling and screaming for help.”

Upstream, rescue workers had three times thrown inflated bags to her. She grabbed at each one but was only able to hold on for 15 seconds or so.

Overhead, a CHP helicopter had dropped a harness to the drowning woman, but she was too weak to put it on. With no audio communication between him and the pilot, Manzeck used hand signals to call for a line.

“Conditions were extremely difficult,” Manzeck explains. “There was literally a two-foot margin between the trees and the barbed wire fence where they had to drop the line.”

There was no time to call for the three-point harness normally used in water rescue, so the hoist operator in the helicopter, Sheaun Bouyea, lowered the rescue harness – a simple collar designed to slip around the victim.

The collar was not designed to bear Manzeck’s weight and it tightened around his chest as soon as he was lifted. “I could feel my breathing get shallower and shallower,” says the Clayton Valley grad.

Powerful rescue.

In the churning water, Manzeck was pummeled by logs and bashed around on the rocks. They could no longer see Hogan.

Suddenly, the helicopter lost lift and Manzeck plunged underwater for several seconds – long enough that he thought he was drowning. While he was under water, the unconscious woman’s head bumped into his knee.

Manzeck thought quickly. With all the strength of his 6 feet and 245 pounds, he gave her a kick hard enough to push her above the surface and onto a rock. This gave him a much-needed few seconds on the skid of the helicopter to catch his breath before going back down to complete the rescue.

Spinning on the end of the line and whipped around by the wind of the helicopter, Manzeck fought his way to where Hogan lay on the rock. Sometime during his first attempt, he had dislocated his right shoulder. When he finally reached her, he had only one good arm to lift her from the rock and carry her to shore where paramedics began resuscitation. She was revived in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

“It was a good ending but sad, too,” Manzeck notes. “She was alive, but she had just lost her loved ones.”

The woman’s son, Tim, 40, was trapped in the car when it overturned and died. Her husband, James, 79, had also been swept away by the raging waters. His body was found three days later near Buchanan Field Airport in Concord.

A team effort.

Later that night, Manzeck went to John Muir Hospital for treatment of a separated shoulder and torn ligaments. There, he reunited with Janet Hogan, who gave him a well-deserved hug and a kiss on the cheek.

Hailed as a hero by the media and called an “angel’ by Hogan, Manzeck deflects the praise and credits teamwork for the successful rescue.

“The most important thing in the whole operation was that the CHP helicopter self-dispatched in cruddy weather,” he says. “And the guys throwing down the bags along the way bought us the 45 seconds we needed at our end.”

During the rescue, Manzeck didn’t have time to think about his actions. “It’s all technical. The training kicks in and all you think about are the techniques.”

“Fearless” is the word mom Linda uses to describe her son. She and Manzeck’s father, John, live in Clayton.

Battalion chief Bryan Cisterman, the incident commander during the rescue, calls a water rescue of that nature “about as difficult as it gets.”

“David has the one thing that that you can’t teach – a good attitude,” reports Cisterman.

A lifelong calling.

Manzeck, a 1992 CVHS graduate, has always known he’d be a firefighter. “It’s a calling,” says the 36-year-old. “I can’t ever think of when I didn’t want to be one.”

“He used to play ‘fireman’ with his grandmother for hours,” says his mom.

Manzeck’s mentor, Tony Semenza, recalls a high level of commitment from his early teens. “He had a real determination to learn and a real inquisitiveness. You could see it in his eyes,” says Semenza, a retired Chevron fire chief.

Manzeck began his career as an EMT right out of high school, followed by paramedic training. In 2003, he became a firefighter/paramedic with the county Fire Protection District and was promoted to fire engineer in 2007. Last year, he was assigned to Station 84.

“I wanted to be on the ladder truck. The water training comes with that,” he says.

Janet Hogan was his first water rescue.

Married for eight years, Manzeck and his wife Christy live in Tracy with children, Kaleb, 6, and Tyler, 2. Another son, Aiden, is due in June.