If he’d left Wichita a minute or two earlier, there’s a good chance Ryan Lane would be dead now.

Lane, 24, was driving back to Lawrence on the Kansas Turnpike about 9 p.m. Saturday when he suddenly found himself in about two feet of water.

“It was raining really hard,” he said. “I was only going about 45 miles an hour.”

Lane was about 10 miles south of Emporia, where minutes earlier a 6- to 7-foot wall of water had swept seven vehicles off the turnpike, killing four young children from a Liberty, Mo., family.

The children’s mother, Melissa Rogers, still was missing Monday evening; their father, Robert Rogers, survives.

Also missing was 31-year-old Al Larsen, of Fort Worth, Texas. Authorities believe he was swept away while trying to help others.

Lane said he pulled over, figuring it was best to wait out the storm. But within a minute or two, he realized his shoes were getting wet — water was slowly filling his 1994 Mercury Cougar. So he sat on the console between the front seats.

“When the water reached my butt, I opened the sunroof and sort of climbed out,” Lane said. “That’s when I realized the situation was pretty dangerous, but after I got out, I was OK.”

To the rescue

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By then, the water was waist-high and rising.

“I could see this white Jeep Cherokee ahead of me and I went over to it and this guy said, ‘You’ve got to help me. I got a 2-year-old in the car and a pregnant wife!’ So he got them out and I helped the woman get over the (concrete) median and get over to the southbound lane; the water wasn’t as deep there,” Lane said.

Turning around, he saw “another guy carrying an elderly woman in his arms.” Lane helped the man take the woman to safety. After that, he said, he helped another elderly couple and two 16-year-old girls to safety.

The girls, he said, were crying because they’d ruined their parents’ car and were sure they were in trouble.

Lane said he and the other man then helped an elderly man to safety.

“It was at that point that we got swept over the median,” he said. “The water was like waist high on one side of the median, and ankle deep on the other side — but it was moving really fast. It knocked both of us over.”

The fall caused Lane to lose his eyeglasses.

“After that, the guy said I should go and tell people to start backing up,” Lane said. “We parted company at that point. I didn’t see him again, I have no idea who he was.”

Lane said he was unaware that seven vehicles had been swept off the turnpike or that the Rogers children had been killed.

‘Now I know’

As he walked up the turnpike to tell people to begin backing up, he encountered John Ortley and LaDonna Parker, also from Lawrence.

The couple, headed for Oklahoma City for Labor Day weekend, gave Lane a dry T-shirt and let him sit in their warm car.

“They were very nice,” Lane said. “I really appreciated that.”

Parker says Lane is a hero. “It took a lot of courage to do what he did,” she said Monday. “After he got out of his car, instead of saving himself he went in and saved others. Most people, I think, would have gotten out of there.

“It was dark and cold,” she said. “You couldn’t see anything and nobody knew what was going on. Most people just stayed in their cars because it was raining so hard.”

Some, she said, grew impatient and started honking their horns.

“It wasn’t until the sheriff arrived and starting turning people around that things started to calm down,” Parker said.

A psychology major, Lane graduated from Kansas University in 2001. He plans to pursue a master’s degree “somewhere else” next year; until then, he’s a front-desk clerk at the Ramada Inn, 2222 W. Sixth St.

In retrospect, Lane called Saturday night a positive experience.

“By that I mean, most of us think we know how we’d react in an emergency, when our own lives are in jeopardy,” he said. “But until it happens we really don’t know. Well, it happened and now I know.”

Lane stayed on the scene until a tow truck took his car to an Emporia salvage yard.

“I’m sure it’s ruined,” he said, “but it’s insured.”