Sister Margaret Anne describes herself as a shy person who goes out of her way to avoid being the centre of attention.

But the Miami-area nun couldn’t avoid the international spotlight after an online video surfaced of her mowing through fallen trees with a chainsaw after Hurricane Irma.

Speaking with CTV News Channel on Thursday, Sister Margaret Anne explained the story behind the video. She said she rode out the storm with her fellow nuns at Archbishop Coleman Carrol High School near Miami, where she is the principal.

When the nuns headed back to their convent on Monday, they came upon a blocked road, and Sister Margaret Anne said she saw a car spin out in the mud and nearly crash into a concrete wall.

So she went back to the high school, grabbed a chainsaw and got to work dressed in a full habit.

“I had the time, I had the chainsaw, and I figured I’d just do what I could to help out,” she said.

Sister Margaret Anne spent the next three hours carving through fallen trees branches. As she worked, passers-by thanked her and took photos.

She admits it was tricky to do in her habit.

“I had to be very careful because the front part is called a scapular, and it blows in the wind and I had to be very careful that that didn’t blow into the chainsaw,” she said,

She was so focused that she didn’t notice when a police officer started shooting video on his phone.

“Afterwards, the police officer handed me a pair of gloves and thanked me and said, ‘You don’t have to do this, the police will come and do it.’ And I said, ‘But it’s going to take them too long and they’ve got a lot of people to care for,’” she recalled.

The officer later posted the video to the Miami-Dade Police Department’s Facebook page, where it has been seen more than 5.9 million times.

Sister Margaret Anne said the attention has been largely positive and that she thinks she’s shattered some people’s perceptions of what nuns do.

“They think that maybe we just sit in the church and just pray all the time. We do pray, and our prayer is what gives us strength, feeds our relationship with our Lord, and then that sends us out to want to love and serve and help anybody that we can,” she said.

“We always are ready to roll up our sleeves, do what’s necessary to help out wherever.”