Seventeen years ago, Arizona sent an elite search-and-rescue team to New York after the 9/11 terror attack left the World Trade Center’s towers in rubble.

Four members of that same crew are part of another team heading to North Carolina, arriving late Wednesday, in anticipation of Hurricane Florence.

Phoenix Fire Captain Rob McDade says the team includes 35 firefighters, two Phoenix police officers with K-9s and 10 support staff. 

“We’ve got a very highly skilled swift water team, they were in Katrina, they were in Houston, and now they’re headed to the East Coast … which, they just found out is almost approaching a Category 5.”

McDade says Phoenix was an early adopter of funding search-and-rescue training in the 1970s, when flooding was a serious and common occurrence during monsoon cycles.