Over the weekend, a Florida neighborhood nearly suffered a catastrophe when a small aircraft plummeted from the sky, narrowly missing residential buildings.

Residents in a Miami suburb used an ax, fire extinguisher and garden hose to rescue four people from a small plane that crashed into a tree in yet another mishap near a busy South Florida airport. “It was nothing short of heroic,” Angelo Castillo, the mayor of Pembroke Pines in Broward County, said Tuesday.