If you’ve ever been trapped on an elevator, you know how traumatizing it can be. Sometimes you’re stuck for hours in a claustrophobic little box wondering when emergency services will arrive and pry you out. But while getting stuck in an elevator is a pretty big nuisance already, just imagine water flooding in from all sides like some sort of horrific carnival act. Terrified yet?

For Tony Luu and his friends, the nightmare was made real on the night of Saturday August 7th, 2021. The city of Omaha, Nebraska was hit that night by a staggering amount of rain in a short amount of time, setting off flash flooding across the city. The floods were rising up to 3 feet on some of the roads, making the streets an unsafe place to be. To check out some of the wreckage outside their apartment, Tony and two of his friends boarded the elevator around 10 pm and headed down to the lobby. That’s when disaster struck.

As soon as the elevator reached the lobby, water came rushing in through the elevator vents. Tony and his friends managed to capture on video the moment the water came rushing in, splashing their feet with murky brown water. The doors didn’t open, causing the water to rapidly fill the elevator like something out of a horror film.

“Once it got to my stomach, we kind of figured, ‘Okay, this is real,'” said Tony.

The video then shows one of Tony’s friends on the phone as the floodwater has now reached the level of their armpits. “Okay, can you please just hurry?” the woman says frantically.

While his friend was on the phone to emergency services, Tony called his roommate, who did maintenance for the building. “We might die if you don’t come help us,” he told his roommate.

Luckily, his roommate and two others were able to come and pry open the elevator door from the lobby. The water had risen up to Tony’s neck at this point, and he was forced to stand on the elevator railing to keep his head above water. As soon as the doors came open, the water spilled out with Tony and his two friends swimming along with it.

Tony and his friends were hardly the only rescue that needed to be made that night. A pair had to be rescued from the top of their car after becoming stranded on the road by rising floodwaters. Meteorologists claimed that around 3 to 5 inches of rain fell in Omaha that day, causing deadly flash flooding the likes of which hadn’t been seen in years.

Thankfully, no one in the elevator was injured, and no other injuries were reported in the city. The situation could have been a lot deadlier, but the trio’s fast thinking and reaching out to friends in the building probably saved their lives.