Nursing Home Residents Rescued After Photo Goes Viral

One of the most widely circulated images to come out of the Texas flooding on Sunday showed several elderly residents of a nursing home sitting in waist-deep water. "Need help asap emergency services please RETWEET," tweeted Timothy McIntosh. That's exactly what people did, and Galveston County Daily News reports that 15 elderly residents and three others from the La Vita Bella nursing home in Dickinson were rescued from the facility within hours. "We were air-lifting grandmothers and grandfathers," says the chief of emergency management in Dickinson.

The New York Daily News provides background on the tweet. McIntosh lives in Tampa, Florida, but his mother-in-law in Texas, Trudy Lampson, owns the nursing home and sent the image to him and his wife. He quickly put it online. "Thanks to all the true believers that re-tweeted and got the news organizations involved," McIntosh wrote in a follow-up tweet after the rescue. "It pushed La Vita Bella to #1 on the priority list." The myth-busting site Snopes looked into the veracity of the image and reports nothing fishy about it. (More Hurricane Harvey stories.)