SERVPRO is the proud Official Cleanup and Restoration partner of the LPGA Tour. SERVPRO gets people’s homes and lives back to normal, helping to make any situation “Like it never even happened.” But SERVPRO knows that they wouldn’t be able to do what they do if it wasn’t for first responders, which is why the company takes the time to work with first responders and first responder charitable organizations to thank them for all their hard work and bravery when disaster does strike.It was through the hurricanes that struck the Tampa Bay area in 2024 that SERVPRO met Jeremy Johnson. This is his story.

Jeremy Johnson always knew he wanted to be a firefighter.

As far back as he or anyone else in his family can remember, that was his chosen career path, a decision Johnson made long before he realized just how important his life’s work would ultimately be to his community at large. Originally hailing from St. Petersburg, Fla., Johnson moved to Tampa for college at the University of South Florida, attending both EMT school and the fire academy after he graduated.

He got a job with Hillsborough County Fire Rescue nearly two decades ago and added a paramedic certification to his resume, a requirement for those wanting to serve in Johnson’s capacity in the state of Florida. Now, 19 years later, Johnson is currently a Fire Captain within his department, overseeing the day-to-day operation of the fire service while knowing that he and his crew’s plans can change in a split second if there is someone in need of emergency assistance.

“It's certainly a humbling experience, to say the least. We're never seeing people during their best,” Johnson said. “Sure, we do demos and go to schools and talk to kids and have people stop by the stations and wave to people in the grocery stores and all the normal stuff. But then, when it comes time for an emergency, that's somebody's worst day typically, so we just try to face it the best we can. We're all human as well, and unfortunately, we do see some horrific things, and we kind of lean on each other to deal with that.”

Considering how much experience Johnson has had, one can only imagine what tragedy he has witnessed throughout his career, the life-and-death situations in which Johnson has found himself over the years. But even though he often sees complete strangers in the most terrible, tragic moments of their lives, Johnson is grateful for the opportunity he has to help those in need, considering it a privilege to serve his community every time a call comes in at the firehouse, even though it can sometimes come with potential life-altering sacrifice.

“Risk a lot to save a lot is the term that we would use,” Johnson explained. “We're not going to run into an abandoned, burning building and risk that building collapsing on us when we know it's abandoned. But when someone's house is on fire and you know there's a family in there, you're certainly going to risk a heck of a lot more. You're risking your own life, and then in the back of your mind, you got your family's lives and kids and you (don’t) know what's going to happen. You got to make it out of there for them.”

So, when the Tampa Bay area was battered by back-to-back hurricanes last fall, leaving many in need of rescue, Johnson knew that he and his fellow first responders were going to have to risk a lot to save as many people as possible after catastrophic floods surged into the local area.

After the Sunshine State dealt with a few smaller storms earlier in hurricane season, Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida’s west coast in late September as a Category 4 hurricane, bringing with it gale-force winds and buckets of rain that did plenty of damage in their own right. But over seven feet of storm surge ultimately devastated the city and surrounding areas, leaving many citizens stranded in their flooded properties and several people dead.

Search efforts

Johnson was a member of a marine deployment team, captaining a four-person rescue boat that was primarily sent out to tend to the sick and injured, also assisting with evacuation of those trapped in flooded homes and buildings. Johnson and his crew were one of the first squads to be called into action after Helene went through, and even though they are thoroughly trained so they can handle these types of disaster-relief scenarios, it was still shocking for Johnson and his team to see just how much damage had been done to their community.

“We saw a tremendous, tremendous amount of absolute destruction,” Johnson said. “It wasn't destruction to structures by hurricanes. It was completely flooded up to people’s middle of their windows on the first story. Nobody in Tampa has ever seen anything like that. We didn't know what to expect. We're in a state of readiness with our boats, and we're all eager. We want to go out. We want to help people. We had no clue what we were getting into. We didn't know exactly what it was going to be like.”

After launching their boat, Johnson and his team spent the entire night and the next morning getting people out of flooded areas, making trip after trip with no breaks and barely enough time to eat or drink anything. There was one experience in particular that Johnson had during their first rescue mission post-Helene that will always stick with him, as he confronted the gravity of the devastation that was unfolding right before his eyes in his own backyard face-on.

“We are going down this road in our boat, and we look over and shine our light into a house to see if anybody's in there,” Johnson recalled. “We see two gentlemen in there, a father and a son, an elderly father, mid-age son. His father is literally floating. He's bedridden, and he's floating on a recliner in the middle of the living room, tilting over, about to fall out of it. They're saying, no, we're not going to leave the house. We don't want to leave.

“The water was still rising. The water was slated to come up two more feet at that time. If we didn't get them out of there, we would have been recovering their bodies in a couple of hours. I didn't know when another boat was going to get there if we couldn't get them out of there. It took some significant convincing to get them out of there. They wouldn't leave without their cats, so we had two cats that were scratching every single person on our boat, losing their minds, about to pop the inflatable boat.

“Then across the street, at the same time, there's an entire family. I think we had eight adults and four or six kids all hanging on their front door, and it's just us. I don't have backup right now. I don't have other boats. I don't have anything. It's just us at this time. So, we had to go over there and get them as well. We ended up having, I think it was 18 people between our regular boat and an inflatable dinghy that we had tethered with us.”

Rescue efforts

After Helene blew through, the Tampa area was hoping it would have time to pick up the pieces and recover a bit, praying that one Category 4 hurricane was going to be enough for the rest of the season. But Mother Nature decided to send Hurricane Milton swirling up the battered Gulf Coast just a couple of weeks later, another storm that threatened to again kick Tampa Bay in the teeth while the city was still very much down and out.

Milton didn’t wind up hitting the Tampa area directly, making landfall a little further south in Siesta Key; however, it still made what was already a bad situation worse, considering how hard that part of the state had already been hit by Helene.

With a new crop of victims needing emergency assistance, Johnson once again served as marine rescue after Hurricane Milton. And even though it still shocked him to see parts of the city completely underwater, Johnson felt like those involved in the relief efforts were much more prepared the second time around to deal with the aftermath of extreme devastation. It also helped that many more people chose to evacuate.

“Where I went for the second deployment was in the heart of Tampa, and I’ve never seen any flooding like that. It was literally like a fishbowl, and places that had never flooded before had six feet of water,” Johnson said. “I didn't realize that that area was going to flood, and I don't know of many other people that I spoke with that had that knowledge, either. Those people were definitely caught off guard.

“My teams were very prepared for that. We went in (with a) game plan and got people in and out quickly. It was a much smoother operation from the street level all the way through all of our higher-up chiefs in our headquarters that are running the whole operation.”

Just a few months on from those two hurricanes, Tampa has somewhat recovered, but many are still dealing with the aftermath of what they went through in September and October, still picking up the pieces after a period of prolific loss. Luckily, his wife and four boys were well away from the areas with the highest levels of destruction, so life has continued on pretty normally for Johnson, as normal as it can be for a firefighter and paramedic anyway.

As he reflects on the events of last autumn, it’s obvious how much pride Johnson takes in what he does for a living and what it means to him to be able to serve others on a consistent basis, to be an everyday hero for those in need no matter the situation. The life of a first responder is a chaotic, dangerous, unpredictable one, and it might not be an occupation that’s a first choice for many fresh out of high school or college. But for Jeremy Johnson, it’s something that he wouldn’t ever change, one for which he’s immensely grateful.

“You never know what's going to happen. You never know if this is going to be your last call,” said Johnson. “There are so many unknowns. One second, you're sitting at the table with your crew, having a conversation and a meal, and then all of a sudden, the tones go off, and you have a structure fire that has an entire family trapped in there.

“It's a very wild experience. I wouldn't trade it for anything. It’s the best job in the world.”

Hometown Hero Jeremy Johnson Serves Tampa Community After Catastrophic Hurricanes

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