This is the heart-stopping moment twin girls aged one and their mum are rescued from a car trapped in a torrent of water that had swept them down a flooded street seconds before their car was washed away.
The dramatic footage shows logistics assistant Marcos Vinícius de Souza Vasconcelos, 20, as he hangs from the door of the bus and reaches over to the woman trapped on the back seat of the vehicle with her twin daughters.
The bus had been used to wedge the car in place as the man hung from the door to rescue the girls in Nova Iguacu. In Baixada Fluminense, in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro.
The crying toddlers were then handed through the window into the safe hands of their rescuer as the waters flooded along the street below them.
But seconds after the mum is helped from the car to the bus and safety, the cart is ripped free and sent off down the street with the flood waters.
Marcos was a passenger on the bus on Ministro Lafaiete de Andrade street, in Comendador Soares, when he saw the family car stuck in the flood.
He said the bus had taken a different route because of the flood waters and by chance, they had spotted people shouting that people were trapped in the car, with the bus then securing it by stopping in front of it.
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The bus was unable to start after the rescue so Marcos decided to clamber out and make his way home on foot, where he then found his own home flooded as well.
His aunt, who lives in the house next door, also suffered losses. The family opened an online fundraiser to raise money to replace the losses and many people logged on to the page to praise him as a hero for the rescue.
His Instagram page, which had 700 followers, now has over 60,000 as a result of the brave rescue, according to reports.
The state secretary of Civil Defense and general commander of the Fire Department, Colonel Leandro Sampaio Monteiro, used social media to pay tribute to Marcos Vinícius.
He said: “I want to congratulate the young man who carried out a rescue just recently in the municipality of Nova Iguaçu. The boy risked his life balancing on a bus to rescue a family that was trapped in a vehicle. Which, shortly after the rescue, was carried away by the current. Hero! Hero ! Hero!”
