Near drowning on Kettle River highlights 'the force that even a summer river can have'
A fun afternoon cooling down on a river near Grand Forks, B.C,. turned into a frightening ordeal for three tubers who nearly drowned when their floaties got pulled into a current and capsized.
Bud Alcock was on a pontoon boat in the Kettle River on Thursday with three friends who had tied their tubes together to float down the water.
The women, aged 38, 55 and 58, were ejected into the water when they hit a tree unexpectedly. None of them were wearing life jackets.
"It was very, very scary," Alcock said. "As I'm running up the beach dragging my pontoon, I'm looking at three of my friends that I think are going to be dead."
One of the women was trapped underwater, her arm tangled up in the ropes of the tube.
Her friend managed to hold onto the tree and tried to keep the tangled woman's head above water, allowing her to inhale gasps of air.
Alcock and another bystander rushed to their aide, trying to figure out how to reach them. They were eventually untangled and made it to Alcock's boat.
"The one lady who got tangled up said afterwards 'I knew I was going to die,'" he told Sarah Penton, the host of CBC's Radio West.
She went to the hospital afterwards for soft tissue damage. The other two also suffered bruising, and Alcock described the group as "very shaken up" and "distraught" by the experience.
Keep tubing safe
Tubing accidents like this are not a rare occurrence.
A search and rescue team pulled a group of tubers, including a young child, off the Campbell River on Vancouver Island a few days earlier.
Last summer saw a number of tubers drown, including a woman in her early 50s on the Cowichan River and a 20-year-old man in the Penticton channel.
Grant Burnard, a search manager for Grand Forks Search and Rescue and a member of the swiftwater rescue team, said tubing fun is part and parcel of hot summer days.
"We don't want to ever stop that fun," he said. "But people underestimate the force that even a summer river can have."
Don't tie rafts or tubes together, wear a life jacket and look ahead downstream for more time to react to hazards, Burnard emphasized.
"It's a fun environment, but it's a risky environment," he said. "You need to manage that risk."
With files from Radio West.
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