'Bachelorette' Hannah Brown helps rescue overboard passengers on whitewater rafting trip
Hannah Brown has moved from "Bachelorette" star to "Dancing With the Stars" champ to, wait for it, whitewater rapids rescuer.
Brown, 25, is being heralded for her action skills after helping to pull whitewater rafters out of the water after they fell into the Tennessee's Ocoee River while she was on a family trip Saturday.
Alex Storgion, the owner of Ocoee Paddleboarding and Watersports, joined Brown and her family on the excursion over the weekend as their rafting guide – they signed up for the "extreme trip," which includes a full day of taking on major rapids, he told Paste BN.
The pre-trip instructions called for members of the group to go into "rescue mode" and paddle toward anyone who fell overboard, Storgion said. So when the second of two rafts from his company flipped its occupants into the water, Brown sprung into action.
"She was just grabbing them like a boss, for sure," he added. "We were all pulling people in, but she was definitely pulling people out by herself. I thought, 'Man this chick's strong.'"
The scene was described on Twitter, with user @quintnugget writing, "How fun Hannah Brown saved my boyfriend from drowning in the Ocoee River today."
She later clarified that her boyfriend "was not literally literally drowning (I’m prone to being dramatic) but most of us did get beat up by rocks in the river after we flipped." Storgion confirmed that deaths on that portion of the Ocoee River were unlikely, but "you could probably get really hurt."
"She was on the river with us, our raft flipped," user @quintnugget explained of Brown. "She ended up pulling my bf onto their raft after the current took him. I didn’t know who she was, but her mom said she had just won DWTS and that she was the Bachelorette!"
"She is strong," she added.
While nearing a "pretty big rapid" later on, the Brown family raft almost flipped over, and Hannah, her brother, Patrick, and dad, Robert, all fell out, he recalled. It was Hannah to the rescue, again: Storgion said she pulled her dad out of the water and back onto the boat.
"I didn't even really know who she was until the end of the trip," Storgion said, adding the Browns were an "awesome family" of "great paddlers."
Patrick Brown alluded to the incident on Instagram. "Took on the rapids with the fam jam! I got to relive my lifeguard days and Hannah thinks she’s apart of the Coast Guard now," he wrote, adding the hashtag #rescuemission. Hannah has not addressed the incident on social media.
'Bachelorette' Hannah Brown: Says she will be 'part of the solution' days after using racial slur
The former "Bachelorette" star vowed earlier this month to be "part of the solution," following criticism of an insufficient apology last month when she used the N-word in an Instagram Live stream.
Brown said in the 18-minute video. "I've realized the most impactful thing I can do is talk to people like me and not be complicit in the problem, but taking accountability for the times when I have been."