River heroes: Grant County PUD employees conduct water rescue, win award

WANAPUM DAM — The volunteers on the emergency response teams for the Grant County PUD do a lot of training – not that it’s boring – but there’s training every month. And then there comes a day it all pays off.

Wanapum Dam’s emergency response team was called on Nov. 13, and did their job so well they won an award earlier this month – one of three “Safety Heroism” awards – from the Northwest Public Power Association.

“Your training becomes first nature,” said Jeremy Coleman, leader of Wanapum’s emergency response team and a hydro mechanic foreman. “When you get that call, it’s almost like flipping a switch.”

The call on Nov. 13 required a water rescue. Ironically, the boat was in the river, as part of the safety protocols for contractors working at the dam, stationed downstream of the dam’s face.

The two-man crew inside the boat attempted to move it in response to the opening of a couple of the dam’s spillway gates. The boat wasn’t near the gates, but the change in the current required it to move.

There was one problem – the engine wouldn’t start.

With no power, the boat was pulled back into the eddy and the rough water swamped it, dumping its occupants into the river. One of the two men got on top of the overturned boat. His phone had survived the dunking, and he managed to make a call.

It was a Friday, Coleman said, and not all of the emergency response team was working. Luckily there was an experienced boat operator on site, a member of Coleman’s maintenance crew, Stephen Gilliland.

“He jumped into (the rescue) with us,” Coleman said.

There is a designated rescue boat at Wanapum Dam, and on that day, it was undergoing repairs in Tri-Cities, Coleman said. Members of the maintenance crew figured that out and were looking for an alternative.

“Their quick thinking sped the whole thing up,” he said.

There was a boat available, which had already been winterized.

“We got it ready and we were able to get it going quite quickly,” Coleman said.

There is a technique to water rescue, he said. Try approaching from upstream and there’s going to be trouble.

“You start rolling around it (the boat),” he said. “It becomes uncontrolled quite quickly.”

So the rescuers approached from the downstream side. One of the two men had been in the water since the boat was swamped, so the rescuers went for him first.

“His body condition; he was the worst,” Coleman said.

Once he was on board they rescued the man stranded on top of the overturned boat, and the rescuers returned to shore as quickly as possible.

Coleman estimated the rescue took 20 minutes from the time the call came from the operations office to the rescue of the second victim.

The rescuers had one garment designed to help warm people up quickly, and the man who had been in the river was wrapped in that.

The people on the rescue team who remained on shore already had a couple of vehicles warmed and heaters blasting to help warm up the victims, and they were treated and released by ambulance crews. If they’d been in the water another 10 minutes, it might have ended very differently, Coleman said.

The emergency response crew’s training, and the quick thinking of other workers, made the difference, he said.

“It was all unfolding so fast everything just fell together,” he said.

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at cschweizer@columbiabasinherald.com.