MOULTRIE, Ga. — A former Moultrie nurse was in the right place at the right time for a 12-year-old girl who nearly drowned in Alabama.

Blake Eunice, who moved to Dothan in March, was with a church group at Blue Springs State Park in Clio, Ala., on Saturday when someone came running up screaming that a girl was drowning. Several members of the church group ran to the springs to try to help.

Blue Springs’ swimming area features two naturally fed pools framed by concrete. A walkway separates the larger pool from the smaller one, and water flows from one into the other through a pipe.

“Little kids had been swimming through that pipe all afternoon,” Eunice said in a phone interview Wednesday.

The girl — whose name is being withheld — got stuck in the pipe. She was struggling, half in and half out of it, about three feet below the surface of the water, Eunice said. Bystanders were already in the water trying to pull her out but they couldn’t.

Eunice said everyone thought the far end of the pipe was blocked with a grate, but when members of his church saw that it wasn’t, two of them jumped in the other pool and pulled the girl through the pipe by her legs.

“When she came out she was lifeless,” Eunice said. “She was gone.”

Eunice, who graduated as a licensed practical nurse from Moultrie Technical College in the spring of 2015, had worked in the emergency department of Colquitt Regional Medical Center until he moved to Dothan. He and another nurse from the church immediately started CPR. Bystanders told him he was doing it wrong.

He estimated he performed CPR five to seven minutes. The girl coughed up water. He found a pulse, and about 10 minutes later she regained consciousness.

“She was able to tell us who she was and talk to her parents,” Eunice said.

An ambulance took her to the Dothan hospital and then to a larger facility in Birmingham, but Eunice said the girl’s mother told him on Tuesday they expected her to be released from the hospital Wednesday. She’s shown no deficits since the incident, he said.

“A miracle had taken place right in front of our eyes,” he said.

Eunice said all the glory for the girl’s rescue should go to God.

“He’s the one who put us all there at the right time,” he said.

Through the whole ordeal, Eunice said the other members of the church were gathered around, praying.

“All I could hear was my church family praying,” he said. “It was like a hum.”

Eunice is a member of The Refuge Church and is employed in the surgical unit of Flowers Hospital, both in Dothan.

A website about Blue Springs State Park notes that no lifeguard is on duty at the springs, but an email from an official at the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources said the department is reviewing all of its safety measures related to the springs in light of this incident.