WAILUKU, Maui — Quick action by a Maui tour van driver and her passengers yesterday saved a boy from being swept into a gulch by raging storm runoff near Peahi.

Driver Lynn Hue of Ekahi Tours was returning from Hana with 10 passengers at about 2:30 p.m. when they passed Haumana Road and spotted what looked like a plastic sack of garbage swept up in a rushing torrent of stormwater on the other side of the road.

A closer look revealed that the object was a boy about 10 to 12 years old, wearing a plastic raincoat and sitting nearly straight up from the force of the flow.

"I just looked to the left and saw this face turn at me and I realized it was a little boy," Hue said. She stopped the van and jumped out of the vehicle, racing across Hana Highway to grab him.

"He was struck with fear. When he saw me he just stretched his arms out and let out a scream," she said. "I grabbed his outstretched arm and the speed of the water took me down."

Hue said she clung to the guardrail while holding onto the boy. The runoff empties over a sheer cliff into a gulch that leads to Halehaku Bay.

"We were just about 50 to 75 feet to the drop-off. He would have been out to sea," she said.

Several passengers formed a human chain to pull the boy and van driver to safety. By then, several residents in the area had appeared to see what was happening. None apparently was related to the boy, although Hue said someone called him "Jeremiah."

"The current was running so fast. She snagged him right before he went off the cliff," said passenger Michael Spiegel, 46, of Baltimore, who was on the tour with his wife, Donna.

Hue, who lives in Wailuku and has worked for Ekahi Tours for nine years, suffered a gash on her upper left arm from the guardrail. After the rescue, Hue and her passengers returned to their van and continued into town. They didn't make a police report and still don't know the boy's name or how he got caught in the storm runoff.

But Hue said she is certain of one thing: "We were there for a reason. If we hadn't been there, a life would have been lost."

Reach Christie Wilson at cwilson@honoluluadvertiser.com.