“It’s not looking too good, darling, I think you’d better pack a few things and go to your mother’s place. And you’d better take Rosie and Monty with you.”

Putting down the phone, Sara sighed. Tomorrow was her husband Tony’s birthday. She had planned to cook him a nice meal and then surprise him with the new mountain bike she’d bought for him. If she went to her mother’s house, Tony wouldn’t get his present for days.

However, her mother’s house was the best place to be right now. Being on higher land, it would be safe from the floods. It had been raining heavily for almost two weeks and the river near Sara and Tony’s house was rising higher and higher all the time. Tony and others from the village had spent the last two days putting sandbags along the side of the river to stop it from overflowing. Now they feared that their hard work had been useless and soon the whole valley would be flooded.

Sara dressed baby James in warm clothes and collected the things she would need for him over the next few days. She put the lead on the dog and went in search of Monty, the cat. It took her a long time, but eventually she found him safe and warm under the covers on her bed. She placed him in his cat basket and took him into the kitchen where James and the dog, Rosie, were waiting.

Just as she was reaching for the car keys, Sarah heard a sound like the noise bath water makes when you pull out the plug. She looked at the backdoor, water was flowing in underneath. Turning around, she saw dirty brown water fountaining out of the drain and filling the sink. Realizing that they were trapped by the flood and it became impossible for her to drive out, quickly she put James into her backpack and pulled onto her back. Calling to Rosie, she picked up the cat basket and ran to the front of the house and out into the front garden, where the car was parked.

The water was already up to her knees, and Rosie was swimming beside her.

Sara, together with James, Rosie and Monty, was hungry and frightened on the roof of the house when a boat appeared in the distance.

After staying at home and taking care of her baby for nearly two years, Rebecca found it hard to make a decision between accepting an attractive offer from her former employer and going on looking after her son Tony at home. She talked, with her husband David, about sending Tony to a childcare center. David gave it a careful thought and decided to leave his job for a year to take care of Tony before he could be sent to a kindergarten, promising to be a super Dad and househusband. It was good news for Rebecca but she knew her husband too well. It would take David some time to get used to finicky（细致的） jobs of taking care of Tony. So she told David she wanted hourly updates on how Tony was handling his day away from Mom.

David was adapting quickly. He texted updates throughout the day, getting hourly instructions from Rebecca. It seemed that David was enjoying his new role and Tony liked the company of Dad, although they often got the home messy. What Rebecca didn’t expect is that David became famous on social media as Super Dad, because people liked watching the videos he posted.

One day, he sent his usual text updates and included a photo of Tony in his car seat during their trip to Walgreens. Rebecca’s reply was to correct Tony’s position in the car seat. And she reminded David that the straps（肩带） were too loose and the chest clip was too low. David laughed at his nagging（絮叨的） wife and rolled his eyes before tightening the car seat and fixing the chest clip. Fifteen minutes later, Rebecca’s phone rang with a call from her husband, “Honey, we had a car accident. We are fine, but the car is going to be totaled（彻底毁坏）.”

Less than three miles from their house, David told Rebecca, a woman had pulled into traffic to turn left.

Rebecca was so thankful that her husband took the extra one minute to put Tony in his car seat safely.

It was late, about 10:15 p.m., when Janice Esposito arrived at the Bellport train station; she jumped into her Honda Odyssey and began the 20-minute drive home to her husband and seven-year-old son. She’d just returned from visiting her mother and had traveled the route many times before. She practically drove on autopilot: a left onto Station Road, then a left on Montauk Highway, and then—wham!

Out of nowhere a car T-boned Esposito’s minivan, pushing her to move backward some 100 feet onto the railroad tracks. She sat in the minivan, bruised (撞伤) but mostly just knocked out by the impact and the airbags.

As it happened, Pete DiPinto was getting ready for bed. He’d just closed his book and was getting under the covers when he heard the sound of metal on metal and breaking glass coming from not far outside his bedroom window. A volunteer firefighter and retired teacher, DiPinto, 64, never stopped to think. He grabbed a flashlight and, still dressed in his pajamas (睡衣), ran out of the door. “Any firefighter would have done what I did,” he told Newsday. “We’re always on duty.”

The first car he came upon, 2,000 feet from his front yard, was the one that had hit Esposito. Once DiPinto concluded the driver was OK, he looked around and sprinted to Esposito’s minivan positioned on the railroad tracks.

And then he heard a terrible sound: the bells signaling an oncoming train.

The heavy train, traveling at 65 miles per hour, crashed into the minivan.