Kevin Rivera and Amadeo Salinas are longtime friends, coworkers, and fathers who dropped everything to head to Shreveport, Louisiana within hours of a brutal storm bringing down power lines and poles across Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas.

“It was tough enough to leave on Father’s Day weekend,” shared Amadeo. “We wanted to stick around, but duty calls.”

Amadeo, a father of two, and Kevin, father of three, were part of an AEP Texas incident response team from the Corpus Christi area dispatched to help restore power throughout the SWEPCO service territory.

A powerful June 16 storm, carrying hurricane force winds, caused significant damage and a loss of power to roughly 250,000 SWEPCO customers.

Their final few days in Shreveport were spent troubleshooting problems in neighborhoods and restoring power to small pockets of customers who remained without service.

Often, the solution was removing wind-damaged tree limbs from power lines.

“We can clear these off, then they’re good to go,” Kevin said one morning, pointing to limbs Amadeo was preparing to cut-back.

But those first couple of days on duty involved accessing miles and miles of damaged lines while making quick diagnoses and repairs in the Shreveport area.

That included a surprise discovery on a Father’s Day assessment patrol in west Shreveport near Cross Lake.

“That day we were patrolling a line by the lake, and we started down the road toward the substation,” Amadeo recalled.

“And Kevin yells out, ‘fire!’”

Kevin, who was driving, says he was shocked to see flames pouring from the side of a nearby home.

“The garage door was open, and you just saw a ball of fire in the garage,” he said.

Kevin said he and Amadeo instinctively grabbed the two powder-filled extinguishers from their truck and ran toward the home.

Racing by two panicked homeowners outside, the AEP Texas utility workers had the fire under control within moments.

“All these trainings we get through the company, they definitely came in handy,” credited Amadeo.

One thing neither could offer a simple explanation for, however, was the timing of it all.

“A lot of things happened to put us there at that time. We were actually running behind schedule,” explained Kevin.

Behind schedule, on a rural dead-end road, in a strange city.

But the homeowners, Sammy and Sandy Maranto, have strong feelings about that one.

“There’s a higher power,” expressed Sammy Maranto. “The Lord was involved.”

Sammy, who admits he’s lucky he wasn’t seriously injured, said he was standing by his generator when he suddenly saw some sort of electrical arch between an extension cord and the generator.

“Then the flame went up, out of the blue,” Sammy explained.

He said the fire quickly spread after at least one gas can caught on fire.

His wife Sandy also expressed her belief their home was saved by a power even more appreciated than having their electricity safely restored the next day.

“Where did these angels come from? That’s all I can think of,” Sandy repeatedly said, hugging both Kevin and Amadeo who came by their home for a quick visit before returning to Corpus Christi.

Two angels from Texas who Sammy fully credits for saving their home.

“Because of you guys, miracles still happen.”