As many public safety personnel across the state continue to lend their aid to those affected in the Texas Hill Country floods, Hockley County Sheriff’s Investigator Tillman spent several days in the area helping.
“I got into this line of work to help people. That sounds cliché, but I mean it,” said Tillman. “I have a six-year-old son and the story of those eight to 12-year-old girls missing drew me toward this one. “I couldn’t imagine not having closure at the very least or to not have my son back.”
Spending a week in the area, Tillman recalls the conditions being terrible. He was part of a 14person chainsaw group that utilized two to four cadaver dogs each day plus an assigned skid steer.
Working to remove debris, the crew spent every day but one in Center Point, Texas. Tillman plus three others worked with chainsaws while the remainder of the group used shovels, rakes and gardening hoes.
“The one day I wasn’t in Center Point I worked in Ingram. We would brief every morning and then we were always assigned a specific area, and we would just walk it,” said Tillman. “We would start cleaning debris and obviously if we smelled things we would try to figure out what it was coming from.”
Tillman added that debri piles could consist of camper trailers, cars, trees and dumpsters. Working in an area he called a “pinch point”, debris piles could reach 30 to 40 feet and be 200 feet long.
“We would cut channels through the piles to see if the dogs could smell anything and work through it,” explained Tillman.
For Tillman, he has offered his services during other natural disasters such as Hurricane Harvey in 2017, Hurricane Ida in 2021 and the Panhandle fires in 2024. During Harvey, he was part of a high-water rescue team along with some other Levelland public safety personnel. Tillman was on a tactical team in New Orleans during Ida and he was part of a search and rescue team when the Panhandle fires took place.
Looking at the amount of public safety personnel who have offered their help, Tillman feels that public safety individuals in Texas are the best.
“I'm not just saying that because I live here, but I think that is something Texas does well,” said Tillmna. “We go all over the place. I went to New Orleans for a hurricane, and I feel like you're always hearing about people from Texas going to other places to help. I'm saying that to take a dig at anyone, but you don't hear of other states doing that type of traveling to other places.
“We have the best law enforcement, best paramedic and medical staff and we have the best fire departments in the U.S. If anything happens in the U.S., we are pretty much the most qualified and as far as Texas goes when it happens here we definitely take care of our own.”