Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem presents medals to Lieutenant Ian Hopper, Lieutenant Blair Oguiofor, Petty Officer 3rd Class Scott Ruskan, and Petty Officer 3rd Class Seth Reece of Air Station Corpus Christi during a ceremony on July 11, 2025. The medals recognize their roles in the Camp Mystic rescue on July 4, when Coast Guard crews evacuated dozens of campers and staff amid flash flooding at the Guadalupe River. (Perry Shirzad/U.S. Coast Guard)
SANTA ROSA, Calif. (Tribune News Service) — Eight miles west of Petaluma, Calif., is a Coast Guard training center whose programs include a highly advanced, 5½-month-long rescue swimmer school that once failed a candidate who ultimately would go on to save dozens of lives during catastrophic flooding in Texas in July.
The training program, officially named Aviation Survival Technician school, is extremely rigorous. Half the people who start it do not finish.
One of the candidates to wash out in recent years was a New Jersey native named Scott Ruskan, a former lifeguard and high school track star whose happy-go-lucky temperament conceals a wide stubborn streak.
Ruskan struggled with a one aspect of the training, a rescue technique involving a single, panicked swimmer.
To test students in that technique, Coast Guard instructors go all-in on simulating a thrashing, desperate victim. Three times Ruskan attempted that rescue. Three times the instructor pummeled him, and he failed.
Rather than accept defeat, Ruskan signed up to take the course all over again. The second time around, having put on some extra muscle, he aced the one-man rescue, graduating as an Aviation Survival Technician 3rd Class in June 2024.
“It sounds weird,” Ruskan told The Press Democrat in a recent phone interview from his base in Corpus Christi, Texas, “but I’m glad they failed me out the first time. If they hadn’t, I wouldn’t be as good a swimmer now.”
And if they hadn’t, Ruskan probably wouldn’t have found himself in Texas Hill Country on the Fourth of July, performing heroics in the teeth of catastrophic flooding that put him in the national spotlight.
Memorable first mission
At least 135 lives were lost in the flash floods that inundated Kerr County, Texas, in the overnight hours leading into July 4. The victims included 28 campers and counselors at Camp Mystic, an all-girls facility on the banks of the Guadalupe River.
While mourning that unfathomable tragedy, the nation also drew some small measure of comfort and inspiration from the courage and competence of first responders — one in particular.
Ruskan, who has served in the Coast Guard since 2021 and whose rank is Petty Officer 3rd Class, was dropped by helicopter at Camp Mystic while floodwaters still raged around it. Trained to work in such perilous waters, his job on this day was to keep himself, and others, on terra firma.
As the sole first responder in a chaotic scene, he was tasked with triage — comforting and wrangling scores of terrified, traumatized, sometimes injured survivors and getting them onto rescue choppers.
By day’s end, Ruskan was credited with helping to save the lives of 165 campers and counselors, a feat made more remarkable by the fact that the 26-year-old was carrying out his first-ever mission.
That, of course, came up in the account he shared with “Good Morning America” as reports of his actions emerged in the flood’s wake.
“I just relied on the training we get. Coast Guard rescue swimmers get some of the highest-level training in the world.” Some of them, as Ruskan knows, get it twice.
Cool under pressure
The candidates who do make it through AST school, said Mike Kelly, one of Ruskan’s instructors at the Two Rock training center, “are basically professional-level athletes.”
When the stakes are raised, said Kelly, an Aviation Survival Technician 1st Class, “some people get really worked up, really high stress.” Ruskan, on the other hand, “was always very even keeled, which is great. It’s what we want to see.”
In addition to being fit and strong and at home in the water, Ruskan “had a good, mild manner,” Kelly recalled — a calmness under pressure that impressed his instructors, and would come into play on his first mission.
Behind Kelly as he spoke on a recent morning, in the far end of the pool, five extremely fit men in their early 20s trained under the eagle eye of Chief Aviation Survival Technician Chris Moore.
As part of their warmup, the AST candidates were working on “water confidence,” Kelly explained,“ trying to teach their bodies that they can operate a little hypoxic” — that is, with less of the oxygen than their bodies are accustomed to during such strenuous activities.
Moments earlier, the students — still in swim fins, goggles and snorkels — had counted off a series of pushups on the pool deck.
The pushups were a consequence for “a cognitive failure,” said the instructor. A candidate had posed a question at the wrong time.
“We hold them to a standard throughout the school. We want to make sure that they are keeping that attention to detail.”
From the office to the pool deck
That was right in Ruskan’s wheelhouse. Before joining the Coast Guard, he studied accounting at Rider University in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, then worked as an intern at the prestigious firm KPMG. But accounting did not exactly quicken his pulse.
“It was boring,” said Ruskan, who was looking for “something a little cooler” — a vocation that called on his athletic background, offered plenty of teamwork and camaraderie. He wanted to “make more of a difference in people’s lives.”
In searching for such a role, he’d “stumbled on” the Coast Guard’s rescue swimmer program — having somehow missed the school’s blockbuster-treatment in the 2006 film “The Guardian,” starring Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher.
When KPMG offered him a full-time job in 2021, Ruskan recalled, “I said, ‘No, I’m good. I’m going to join the Coast Guard.’”
Other than his death struggle with the one-man rescue, which forced him to take the course a second time, Ruskan was a strong student, thriving in particular in dry-land training — as might be expected of one who’d run the 800 meters, mile and 3,000-meter steeplechase in college.
While it takes some classes longer to jell, “to realize that they need to support each other,” Kelly observed, the group Ruskan graduated with “was really good at that from the beginning.”
Close then, they remain close, Ruskan reports.
“We still talk in a group chat almost every day. Anytime one of us does something stupid or does something cool, we’re always texting about it. Love those guys to death. They’re awesome.”
Among the final kernels of wisdom imparted by Chief Moore, Ruskan remembers, was the reminder that “Your first case will be nothing like we’ve trained you for, and you’re going to have to figure it out.”
Elaborating on that message in a recent interview, Moore said, “We can’t recreate everything.” The program is as difficult as it is, he added, to ensure that students leave with a high level of “stress inoculation” — and are prepared to “think on their own, and make decisions based on the tools they have.”
Go time
Painted on a Coast Guard sign outside the gates of the Two Rock base is the Latin phrase Semper Paratus — Always Ready.
Ruskan and his duty crew at Coast Guard Air Station Corpus Christi were ready at dawn on July 4 when orders came down: They were to fly to Kerr County, northwest of San Antonio, where the Guadalupe River had risen an incredible 26 feet in 45 minutes, claiming scores of lives.
Fierce weather and low clouds turned that helicopter journey, which should have taken an hour, into a six-hour ordeal, Ruskan said.
At the controls of the MH-65 Dolphin chopper were commander Lt. Ian Hopper and co-pilot Lt. Blair Ogujiofor. It took them four approaches, navigating narrow river valleys in atrocious conditions, before they could finally set the bird down at Camp Mystic, along the roiling bank of the swollen Guadalupe.
There, the decision was made to leave Ruskan on the ground, where he could organize distraught survivors and get them into the rescue helicopters.
Once on the ground, Ruskan realized he was the sole first responder in the area. “I had about 200 people, kids mostly, all terrified,” he told “Good Morning America.”
Many had minor injuries, “nothing too serious,” he recalled, “but a lot of them were very scared. I was just trying to console them.”
It was also his job, Ruskan told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, to make assessments about who got on the rescue helicopters first. “The youngest ones, I wanted to get those guys out of their first.”
He spent the next four hours ushering survivors to the safety of awaiting choppers.
In addition to his crewmates on the MH-65 Dolphin, Ruskan soon began working closely with, and shepherding survivors to UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters deployed by Texas A&M Task Force 1 and the state’s Army National Guard.
“They were stellar. What awesome professionals to work with,” he effused on CNN, unprompted — just as he went out of his way on other media outlets to put a spotlight on his crewmates, on other rescue swimmers who worked the floods, and on the survivors at Camp Mystic themselves, for their bravery.
He wasn’t deflecting credit for the mission’s success so much as he was spreading it around. “If I’m in the spotlight for a couple minutes, let me share a little bit of love with everyone else who isn’t,” he said in a Thursday interview.
“It took a village, right?”
That attitude might be what his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, was referring to when she lauded his selflessness in a post on X. “Scott Ruskan is an American hero,” she added.
Among the long list of public figures lining up to praise him was Georgia Rep. Buddy Carter, who stood in the well of the House of Representatives on July 24, his voice quavering ever so slightly as he thanked Ruskan for “leading the triage” and saving over 160 people, “including my twin granddaughters, whose birthday is today.”
“Thank you, Scott, for your courage, and for changing the course of many families’ lives, including my family. God bless you.”
© 2025 The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, Calif.).
Visit www.pressdemocrat.com.
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
