Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class David Weydert

Tonight on "Nightly News," Lester Holt offered a glimpse into the U.S. Coast Guard swimming rescue team, the elite group that saves people from treacherous waters. 

He visited them on June 4 during their training mission at the Coast Guard Air Station in Elizabeth City, N.C.

Below, a sampling from the students' grueling program -- from push-ups to hours logged in the pool. 

Here, Lester Holt speaks with Lt. Commander Steve Bonn, an MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter pilot from Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City, N.C., before departing for a training mission over the Pasquotank River near the air station. 

Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Brandyn Hill

Airman Marshall Blom, an Aviation Survival Technician (AST) in training, undergoes physical training with kettle bells. 

Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Brandyn Hill

Leg strengthening is another important part of the program. 

Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Brandyn Hill

The plank, a workout for the entire body, is part of Petty Officer 2nd Class Eric Young's regimen for those in training. 

Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Brandyn Hill

Airman Joshua Piasecki assists Airman Adam Via into a rescue basket in the rescue swimmer training facility pool.

Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Brandyn Hill

Lester Holt participates in a "survival tow" during a training rescue.

Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Brandyn Hill

Piasecki places Lester Holt in a rescue basket and prepares him for hoisting.

Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Brandyn Hill

Petty Officer 2nd Class Eric Young, an AST instructor, is hoisted out of the water using a rescue stop.

Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Brandyn Hill

A successful mission: Young makes it out of the water, thanks to Piasecki. 

Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Brandyn Hill

The rescue swimmer training pool. 

Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Brandyn Hill

AST students stand at attention following the raising of the national ensign on June 5 at 8 a.m., signifying the start of their work day.  

U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd class David Weydert

Airman Zachary Burley climbs to the top of the first rope at the pool rope course.

U.S Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd class David Weydert

AST training is not only physical challenging, but mentally challenging as well, pushing students to their breaking point.

U.S Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd class David Weydert

The rope course, one of many physical challenges, also demands coordination and acumen.

U.S Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd class David Weydert

Two women and a 3-year-old girl were rescued from an SUV Wednesday night, after the vehicle was swept off the road by rising floodwaters into a ditch in Worth County, Iowa, the sheriff's office said.

Video cameras captured the rescue, which KTTC revealed took 45 minutes. Worth County Sheriff's Lt. Daniel Shaffer said the rescue was a joint effort of “several different fire departments.”

The video shows rescuers using a zip-line-type maneuver to safely transport the child from the SUV, through the choppy waters and onto dry land.

"Torrential downpour with very heavy rains, poor visibility, poor surface conditions," Shaffer described the conditions after the rescue.

Worth County is under a flood warning until 8:30 p.m. local time on Thursday, according to weather.com. “Do not drive your vehicle into areas where the water covers the roadway,” the site warns, “turn around … don’t drown.”

The three victims were examined at the scene and found to be in good health, Kare11.com said.

Adrees Latif / Reuters

Taylor Tennyson sits in the front yard as family members salvage the remains of their home, devastated by the Moore tornado.

The tornado that roared through the Oklahoma City suburbs earlier this week damaged or destroyed as many as 13,000 homes and did as much as $2 billion in damage, authorities said Wednesday.

The figures underscored the colossal task facing emergency crews as they shifted their focus, two days after the storm, from looking for trapped victims to tackling the mountain of wreckage and helping displaced families.

Authorities said six people, all adults, remained unaccounted for, but they said those people may simply have walked away from the storm and were not necessarily buried in the rubble.

“We’re transitioning into recovery,” said Albert Ashwood, the state emergency management director. “I’d be the last one to say that it’s totally over.”

The tornado killed 24 people and injured more than 200.

The $2 billion damage figure was given by Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett and matched a preliminary estimate given by Oklahoma insurance officials to The Associated Press.

That would make the tornado, which ravaged the city of Moore and parts of Oklahoma City, one of the most expensive in American history. The tornado that all but wiped Joplin, Mo., off the map two years ago did $2.8 billion in damage.

Slideshow: Tornadoes ravage Plains

Tannen Maury / EPA

A monster tornado hit Moore, Okla., Monday afternoon, leaving at least 24 dead.

Launch slideshow

Authorities in Oklahoma announced late Wednesday that they had identified all of the bodies, and they said that the youngest victims were infants, 4 and 7 months old. They said 10 of the 24 dead were children, up from an earlier figure of nine.

Heartbreaking portraits of the dead began to emerge. Among them were a third-grader remembered for her ever-present smile and a 65-year-old man separated from his wife when the tornado struck.

Federal relief workers set out trying to reach families displaced by the storm but said they faced challenges: Cellphones were not working in some places, and other people were focused on salvaging their belongings before they registered for help.

A White House official said Wednesday afternoon that 1,500 people had registered for federal help through the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Administrator Craig Fugate said teams were going through neighborhoods looking for more.

“Right now it’s about getting people a place to stay who have lost their homes,” he said on “Morning Joe.” “We want to make sure they are getting the help they need.”

A tour given to NBC’s TODAY of Plaza Towers Elementary School, where seven children were killed, revealed forgotten everyday fixtures of grade school — a basketball covered by splinters of wood, a tattered map of the United States, a textbook about the volcano destruction at the ancient Italian city of Pompeii.

As cleanup crews faced acre after acre of wrecked homes, the federal government announced it would pick up 85 percent of the tab for debris removal for the first month, and 80 percent for the two months after that. President Barack Obama announced plans to visit Oklahoma on Sunday.

Authorities faced questions at a press conference about why more people did not have “safe rooms” in their homes to protect them from tornadoes. Officials in Moore had complained about red tape in trying to secure federal grants to build the rooms.

Gov. Mary Fallin said the state would open a donation fund to help pay for “safe rooms” for people who want them in their homes. But authorities brushed off questions about whether the state could have been better prepared.

“It’s the anomaly of severe weather,” Ashwood said, referring to the strength of the tornado, which was classified Tuesday as a Category EF5, meaning it had packed winds higher than 200 mph.

“This is the anomaly that flattens everything to the ground,” he said. “I think everything was done that could be done at the time.”

Meanwhile, the people of Moore planned to keep combing through the ruins and salvaging what they could.

On Tuesday, David Kirsch clutched a recovered American flag and said: “This represents the hope that we can be better off. Because where else in the world could you walk away from this and get back up on your feet?”

Reuters contributed to this report.

This story was originally published on Wed May 22, 2013 7:06 PM EDT

MOORE, Okla. – On a soggy, miserable afternoon in Oklahoma, the search for survivors hit home.

Sgt. Jennifer Wehr has lived in the state for the last 10 years.

“Words can't describe everything we've been seeing right now,” she said.

The Army Reservist was one of about 200 soldiers and airmen from the Oklahoma National Guard that helped sift through the rubble Tuesday in the aftermath of the EF5 tornado that tore through Moore.

EF5 is the most severe level on the Enhanced Fujita scale that rates the strength of tornados and means the powerful storm is capable of lifting reinforced buildings off the ground and can hurl cars through the air.

“I just saw a family digging through a pile [and they] found their dog of five years,” Wehr said. “But unfortunately they found the dog didn't make it – and was buried by the house.”

By Wednesday, the mission had transitioned into search and recovery. No bodies and no survivors have been found since Monday. But search crews – including local firefighters, search teams from Texas and Tennessee and the Oklahoma National Guard – are still pacing neighborhoods.

Sgt. Mike Bell grew up in Oklahoma. He knows tornadoes well.

He was part of the search and rescue effort during the EF5 tornado that ripped through Oklahoma and Kansas on May 3, 1999. That twister killed 46 people in the two states, 36 people in Oklahoma City alone, and leveled many of the same communities – resulting in about $1 billion worth of damage.

Slideshow: Tornadoes ravage Plains

Tannen Maury / EPA

A monster tornado hit Moore, Okla., Monday afternoon, leaving at least 24 dead.

Launch slideshow

But as far as Bell is concerned, “This is a thousand times worse. It’s like a war zone.” He added, “I was deployed to Katrina in 2005; that was bad. This is – words can't describe how bad this is.”

Like most National Guardsman, he has the added the difficulty of working in familiar territory.

“As an Oklahoman, it hurts,” he said. “I mean this is my state where I was born and raised.”

It’s not often an Army reservist chokes up during an interview, but Bell did so when discussing the children who died during the tornado.

He has two young kids of his own. “As a father of two young elementary students,” he paused as he choked up. “It hurts knowing that there were children lost.”

Army Reserve Spc. Brian Cannon lives in Moore, just blocks from where the tornado hit. He said he dodged the storm by hunkering down with family in a storm shelter.

“Being from Oklahoma you kind of get used to it,” he said. “But this was a lot more than we were used to.”

The reservists have their work cut out for them helping with the clean-up. The Oklahoma Insurance Department estimates the damage from Monday’s twister that stretched for more than 17 miles could top $2 billion in damages.

Related: 

• Littlest victims of Oklahoma tornado were 4 and 7 months old, state says
• Chaos and courage as tornado wrecks elementary schools
• Always smiling': First tornado victim identified
• 'The streets are just gone': Oklahoma rescue efforts continue

Kael Alford/NBC News

Leslie Hendricks, 27, and her father, Levi Hendricks Sr., 53, hold their dogs they rescued from the rubble of their house in Moore, Okla., on Tuesday.

MOORE, Okla. – In the rubble of their flattened home, under a car and in a smashed kennel, were the two remaining members of the Hendricks' family: a pair of chihuahuas, Lola and Louie, who survived the monster tornado that struck this Oklahoma town.

Levi, his wife Alice and two of their adult children rushed to their home early Tuesday to this tornado-torn corner of Moore to find their beloved dogs. Cadaver dogs checking their neighbor's house swooped into help.

The Hendricks had found Wiley, their doberman, and Gaby, their boxer, in the backyard earlier. They were under a pile of debris, nestled under the apparent shelter of a picnic table.

“They come out with not a scratch … they were perfectly protected,” Levi said.

But the chihuahuas were stuck inside the house when the killer twister roared through Moore. Lola and Louie were trapped.

Slideshow: Tornadoes ravage Plains

Ed Zurga / EPA

A monster tornado hit Moore, Okla., Monday afternoon, leaving at least 24 people dead as the threat of further storms continues.

Launch slideshow

“They could hear whining and that's how we pinpointed where they were at and started digging at that point,” Levi said, at times wiping at tears.

“Their kennel was smashed down on top of them. The car was sitting on top of the kennel. We had to pry the kennel out from underneath the car and then pry the kennel apart to get them out.”

Levi and his two sons began digging through the rubble to get the beloved pets out. But on the inside, the animals – Louie, a white-fur 3-year-old, and Lola, a black-fur 2-year-old – were just fine.

“They were both wrapped around each other and inside a comforter. They were toasty warm,” Levi said. “And both of them were just tickled to death to get out.”

“They could smell him and hear him,” he said of the cadaver dogs as he cuddled Louie, who shivered and chowed on a breakfast burrito that one of Levi's sons, Levi III, fed him.

“I've got to say God put his hand out and covered both of them,” the elder Levi said as he broke down. 

The couple, who had lived in the home for six years, were at work when the tornado struck. They said their granddaughter, a student at Plaza Towers elementary, where seven children died in the tornado on Monday, also emerged unscathed from the debris, with some scratches on her feet and gravel in her hair. 

They may be able to salvage some items from the garage, but everything else was gone.

“It flattened everything. … There is not really anything left of the house that is even recognizable,” Levi said. As to the future, he said, “I'm just going to leave it in God's hands.”

“The fact that my Bible was fully intact gives me something to hold onto,” his wife, Alice, said. “My Bible says it all.”

Related stories:

Crews comb devastation in Oklahoma

First-person accounts from survivors

Why Tornado Alley is a target

Share your stories of heroism in Oklahoma

Two of the three women held captive in a Cleveland home for a decade have been in contact since their rescue, NBC News has learned.

Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight, who police say spent nine years together in captivity before the were freed Monday, have spoken since Knight was released from the hospital yesterday. 

Knight, DeJesus and Amanda Berry, along with a 6-year-old daughter whom Berry bore in captivity, were discovered Monday night after Berry drew the attention of a neighbor. Ariel Castro has been charged with kidnapping all three women and is being held on $8 million bond.

Of the three, Knight was reported missing first, in August 2002. Berry disappeared in 2003 and DeJesus in 2004. Berry and DeJesus went home from the hospital Wednesday; Knight was hospitalized to receive mental health treatment, her mother said.

Knight, now 32, told investigators that Castro impregnated her at least five times, and starved her and punched her in the stomach until she miscarried, according to a Cleveland police report.

Knight also said that Castro had forced her to deliver Berry’s baby, and threatened to kill her if the baby died, according to the report.

A spokesperson for the women will release a statement to the media at 10 a.m. Sunday.

NBC News' Erin McClam contributed to this report.

Related:

• 'Best of friends': Neighbors describe close bond between victim, Castro's daughter
• 'You're afraid to talk to your neighbors': Suspects' street was perfect hiding spot
• Ariel Castro would 'freak me out,' says neighbor

A man who was pinned by his overturned tractor and losing breath with each scream says he was saved by his two teenage daughters, who found the strength to lift the ton-and-a-half machine.

Jeff Smith of Lebanon, Ore., was trying to pull a stump out of his garden last Monday when his muddy boot slipped off the clutch. The tractor flipped, and the steering wheel pinned his chest to the ground.

The daughters, 16-year-old Hannah and 14-year-old Haylee, heard him screaming and ran to help. They reportedly lifted the tractor enough to free his torso and give him room to breathe.

“It’s amazing. You hear about this kind of stuff — this adrenaline rush, being able to pick cars up and slide people out,” Smith told KGW, the NBC affiliate in Portland. “You never realize it’s really there until you actually witness it.”

The girls tried to dig their father’s arm out but struck compacted dirt. Hannah got on her four-wheeler and found a neighbor, who brought his own tractor and used its shovel to finish freeing Smith, the Albany Democrat-Herald newspaper reported.

Jesse Skoubo / Mid-Valley Sunday

Jeff Smith sits astride his tractor alongside his daughters Hannah, 16, and Haylee, 14 at his Oregon home Saturday afternoon.

Smith was treated at the hospital for a broken wrist and other injuries. Hannah said she called her mother before the ambulance ride. The mother thought it was an April Fool’s joke.

“I just can’t believe it happened, honestly,” Hannah told the newspaper. “We were supposed to go to a friend’s house. I don’t know why we didn’t.”

Since the ordeal, neighbors have finished tilling the garden, and the family has nicknamed the tractor Satan.

This story was originally published on Wed Apr 10, 2013 12:11 PM EDT

RANCHO SANTA MARGARITA, Calif. -- At first, the rescuers couldn't believe their ears: After four days of grueling searching, they suddenly heard a faint female voice calling for help.

Over the next 90 agonizing minutes, the cries for help — and first faint, and then louder — led the search and rescue crew across a canyon, into a drainage and up several waterfalls to a near-vertical slope where lost hiker Kyndall Jack was clinging to rocky outcropping no bigger than a yoga mat. 

The 18-year-old, who had been missing in Southern California's Cleveland National Forest since Sunday, had no shoes, was having trouble breathing and was severely disoriented from dehydration when she was found Thursday. The first thing she asked was what year it was, said Los Angeles County Reserve Deputy Fred Wenzel, who reached her first. Then, she asked for her mother. 

"She was filthy from head to toe, her lips were black with dirt, her eyes were barely open and she had on no shoes," said sheriff's Deputy Jim Moss, a paramedic who was dropped to her by helicopter and airlifted her to safety in a harness. "She was just kind of clinging to the ledge on the cliff side, going in and out of consciousness." 

Her rescuers were afraid to give her water, despite her extreme dehydration, because she had so much dirt in her mouth she could choke, Wenzel said. 

"She was limp and almost lifeless. I was just holding her as the crew chief brought us up and just holding onto her, bringing her in," Moss said of the airlift. 

"She wouldn't have made it much longer. She's really lucky." 

Jack's dramatic rescue brings a happy end to a saga that gripped Southern California since Easter, when Jack and her friend, 19-year-old Nicolas Cendoya, called 911 to report that they were lost and out of water after wandering off the trail during what they expected would be an easy day hike on the Holy Jim Trail. 

The popular trail is in the Cleveland National Forest, where the dangers of 720 miles of rugged mountain wilderness run smack up against the planned communities and shopping malls of suburban southeast Orange County. Jack and Cendoya, who was rescued late Wednesday after being spotted by hikers, parked their car off a dirt road just a few miles from an upscale neighborhood where on Thursday children bounced on trampolines and customers sipped lattes at a Starbucks in an outdoor strip mall. 

The two got separated sometime Sunday night and were both found less than a mile from their car and "very, very close" to one another, although they did not know it, said Lt. Jason Park, an Orange County sheriff's spokesman. 

"I have no doubt that they came out here with the best of intentions ... but this is a complicated environment and before you know it, you're lost," he said, adding that having civilization so close can lull some hikers into a false sense of security. "It's just as dangerous today out here as it was on Sunday afternoon." 

Despite their joy at finding both hikers alive, rescuers anxiously awaited word on the condition of a reserve deputy who suffered a head injury when he fell 60 feet down the canyon. He was also flown to a hospital where he was in serious condition but expected to survive, said Park. 

Many details of the pair's ordeal remained a mystery and officials hoped to question them more closely once they were rested and more stable. 

It's unclear, for example, why Jack and Cendoya went off the well-marked trail and how much water they had with them. It's also unclear exactly when and how they got separated. 

Before his cellphone's battery died, Cendoya was able to make a 911 call — and already the pair seemed in trouble. 

"He was panting and said, 'We're out of water.' You could hear Kyndall in the background," said Orange County fire Capt. Jon Muir. "He said, 'I think we're about a mile or two from the car,' and he was right about the distance but in totally the wrong direction." 

Cendoya was found Wednesday night in shorts and a shirt but missing his shoes and told doctors he'd become separated from Jack sometime Sunday night. He was flown to Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, where doctors said he was being treated for severe dehydration, scratches and bruises. He was expected to remain for several days. 

Park said Cendoya was "extremely confused and disoriented," when he was found just 500 feet from a heavily traveled dirt road, giving an added urgency to the effort to find his friend.

Jack was found in similar condition, dressed in a pair of dirty athletic shorts, a hoodie and socks, having also lost her shoes. She had low blood pressure, trouble breathing, pain in her legs and right hand and was fading in and out of consciousness when rescuers reached her, Moss said. It was unclear how she wound up on the precarious ledge and she was too ill to tell her rescuers, they said.

She had no memory of going hiking or of being with Cendoya, they said.

Despite that, she suffered no major internal injuries and was listed in good condition at the University of California, Irvine, Medical Center, said hospital spokesman John Murray.

Like Cendoya, she was being treated for dehydration and was expected to be hospitalized for several days.

At Mission Hospital, Dr. Michael Ritter told reporters Cendoya said he survived by taking shelter at night in heavy brush and passing his days by praying.

"He's got a lot of faith in the Lord, which I think will help him to work his way through this," Ritter said shortly before Jack was located.

Cendoya says on his Facebook page that he's a 2011 graduate of Orange County's Costa Mesa High School and a student at Orange Coast College. A number of photos show the athletic-looking young man working out and lifting weights.

The area where the two got lost is in a section of forest in the Santa Ana Mountains that lies along the border of Orange and Riverside counties southeast of Los Angeles. The trail ranges in elevation from about 2,000 feet to about 4,000 feet.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- Rescue workers saved a hiker who was trapped under rocks for as many as eight days without any food and water, according to firefighters.

Hiker Ramon Llamas and his German shepherd-mix "Molé" discovered the man about 8:30 a.m. PT (11:30 a.m. ET) Monday on Mount Rubidoux in Riverside, Calif.

"I said to the guy, 'You need help? Are you OK?' When he reacted, he says, 'Somebody there? Please don't leave me. Don't leave me,'" Llamas said. "'You got some water?' And I gave him water, and a minute later, he said, 'You got some more?' Are you by yourself? 'Yeah, I'm a tourist here. I'm hungry.'"

About an hour later, rescue workers were able to free the 44-year-old man whose foot was pinned under rocks. He was hospitalized with symptoms of dehydration.

More news from NBCSanDiego.com

The man -- who identified himself as Paul -- told firefighters he lived "back east" and was trapped for four to six days, although officials said it could have been as long as eight days because the victim was unconscious at times.

The man did not have any food or water with him, firefighters said.

Elisha Page / AP

An excavator is used to break up a sheet of ice on the Big Sioux River, below the falls at Falls Park Friday, March 15, 2013.

Emergency crews searched Friday for the bodies of a man and woman who jumped into the icy waters of the Big Sioux River in South Dakota to save a six-year-old child before the two were swept off by the raging current themselves.

The boy is safe, but Sioux Falls authorities said on Friday morning that the effort to find the two adults is now considered a recovery and no longer a rescue mission.

The two jumped into the river near Sioux Falls around 6 p.m. local time on Thursday after the young boy fell in, according to local NBC affiliate KDLT.

Police identified the young boy as Garrett Wallace of Vermillion, S.D. at a Friday afternoon press conference, according to the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. The woman was identified as the boy’s 16-year-old sister Madison Wallace, and the man as Lyle Eagletail of Sioux Falls, the local paper reported.

“By the time I got there he was already in there and they had him by the arm,” Napoleon Ducheneaux, a friend of the man who dove in, told KDLT.

“They had the kid in his arm and he slipped and fell. And then not too long after that, the kid popped up a little bit to the right and climbed up the rocks by himself," he added.

The two rescuers found themselves in trouble.

“I heard him and the woman talking. He said something like, ‘You hold on to me, I’ll hold on to you.’ And I kept telling them to come to my voice,” Ducheneaux told KDLT.

The two then slipped under the water, Ducheneaux said.

Sioux Falls Fire Rescue Chief Jim Sideras said a crane might be brought in to help rescue workers in the icy river.

"We have some issues with very thick ice that we are trying to address. We also have a high flow of water because of ice melting," he said.

"We have a lot of foam. We have on the scene crews who are trained in swift water rescue and ice rescue. We also have on site a dive team. Because of the thickness of the ice, it's not possible for that team to go in. We are still doing search patterns," he added.

Sideras told KDLT that the boy was safe with family members. “I was with him and he’s with family members, and he’s doing fine,” Sideras said.

This story was originally published on Fri Mar 15, 2013 6:42 AM EDT

A door-to-door salesman selling home fire alarms noticed smoke coming from a Texas home, heard a woman screaming and broke a window to rescue her.

Kaeriel Evans, 18, who has Down syndrome, was inside by herself when the blaze started in the 1600 block of Homestead Place, Garland, near Dallas, at about 6 p.m.

"I heard this lady yelling, 'Help, help,'" said Corey Anderson, of Rowlett. "I looked down and saw the smoke so I took off running, and -- reaction -- I just started kicking in the windows."

He tried to find her but couldn't at first.

"As far as I went in, I couldn't see nothing," Anderson said. "It was just smoke."

Then, he heard her voice again.

"I heard somebody say, 'Help me, help me,' so I pushed over an entertainment center and kind of went in there and saw the girl and I told her, 'Drop down and come to me.' And she did. And I got her out."

'He's a hero'
Anderson sells home security systems that include fire alarms, he said. He hadn't yet made it to her house when he saw the smoke and flames.

Evans was transported to Parkland Memorial Hospital with smoke inhalation and minor burns but was expected to recover.

Soon, Evans' brother arrived home. "When I saw the house burned up, that's the first thing I asked about -- where is my sister?" Kavaucey Lewis said.

Read more from NBCDFW.com

Lewis, 20, said he lives in the house with five siblings and their mother.

He quickly learned about her rescue and thanked Anderson.

"I just told him how much I appreciate it because my sister is my heart," he said.

Anderson was humble about what he had done.

"I'm glad I was here and could help," he said. "I really do wish if that was my family, somebody would do the same thing."

Evans said he couldn't thank Anderson enough.

"He went in there and, you know, he's a hero," Evans said. "He went above and beyond."

Anderson said the word "hero" doesn't fit.

"I don't feel like a hero," he said. "I just feel like, I mean, it was reaction. At the time, I just went with my instincts."

Firefighters are investigating how the fire started.