Every year a group of co-workers and I take a trip to a Major League Baseball city, criss-crossing the country in the process in an effort to see every park. Our group overwhelmingly consists of police officers, with many of us being on specialty teams requiring a high level of physical fitness.
I mention this only because it became a significant asset during our excursion this year, after our visit to Denver to watch the Rockies play the Cleveland Indians.
Our trip took a dramatic, nearly tragic turn when we went on a rafting trip on the Arkansas River just outside of Buena Vista on June 19. During our research, we found plenty of reviews and advertisements claiming that this stretch of river was a beginner-friendly trip and that kids as young as nine years old were permitted to raft this piece of the Arkansas.
Nearly everyone in our group had been rafting before, with various levels of expertise but each possessing the physical prowess to take on what was billed as a novice challenge. We would soon discover how inaccurate this assessment really was.
Having 11 people in our group, we were divided into two boats; I was in a boat with five others from our group plus the guide. The remaining five people were in a separate boat that trailed us by a short distance as we began to negotiate the 42 degree water, anticipating about a six hour adventure.
We had made it to roughly mile six when we encountered the first class 3 rapid known as “pinball.” As we approached the center of the rapid, we suddenly “stalled” momentarily and then flipped over in a fraction of a second, sending everyone into the icy Arkansas.
All six of us were initially sucked under the water in the unpredictable rapids. We didn’t immediately think that this would ultimately be a potential tragedy but we came awfully close to experiencing just that.
We all tried to do what we had been instructed to do (feet first to prevent entrapment in the rocks, swim to shore or boat as instructed, don’s panic, etc.) but soon found that these techniques were fairly neutralized by the volume of water from the snowmelt.
I saw two of my friends float by me for a second as I twice attempted to swim to shore, only to be swept back into the middle of the river. On my second trip back to the rapids, a boat appeared and I was pulled aboard. I immediately heard one of the guides saying, “Oh my God” as she directed her attention to one of my friends who clearly was in trouble. I was coughing up water at the time and was incapable of helping anyone. My friend had been pulled to the bottom repeatedly and was struggling to keep on top of the water.
Another friend from my group approached the same boat I was picked up in and the guides told him to swim to shore. He made it, fortunately. The boat that picked me up arrived at shore, where I found three others from my boat.
A fifth person from my boat was struggling to breath and was being attended to by one of the guides, who had taken my friend’s pulse but had done little else. I asked if they had a blood pressure kit and they said no. I asked if medical attention could get to our location and I was told that there was no vehicle access to the particular location but there were two close-by helicopter pads. We essentially waited while our friend slowly improved.
We had no idea where the sixth person in our group had ended up and we were temporarily panicked. He was quickly located about another 200 yards down river; but he was also having trouble breathing.
The two from our group who were impacted the most were Mark and his younger brother. Both of them said that they were seconds away from giving up. Can you imagine making that phone call to their mother?
I suppose some would assume inexperience played a factor. This was not the case for Mark’s brother, who rock climbs, swims with sharks, hikes in Central America and North America, and had recently been on a rafting trip in the Seattle area, where he resides.
We later discovered that a gentleman had died two days prior to our excursion and another would die on this day at 1:22pm, shortly after we had made it to shore. We also discovered that a guide in training from our rafting company had died some weeks earlier in about the same location that we went into the river.
Can somebody explain to me why there is no oversight of these companies? Why is there no governing body that makes the decision on whether to allow rafting on a particular day? Why are there no emergency medical personnel on shore at the most precarious locations on the river? Why are the rafting companies able to advertise this particular rafting trip as a novice- friendly, kid-friendly trip when it’s obviously not?
The release forms that people sign are frankly worth nothing. Liability is not lifted from these companies when they lead people into believing that this is safer than it actually is. I now read that there were four deaths on the Arkansas in one week. I’m not sure how many more families need to be tragically impacted before something is done.
After we made it ashore on our trip, we were exhausted and made a decision to not go on. We simply didn’t have the energy to make it back to the boat if we would have fallen out again. This option left us reduced to walking out. It was probably three miles before we were picked up by a vehicle.
This was no big deal, really, except that we ended up taking Mark’s brother to the emergency room later that evening because he was fatigued, nauseous, and had excruciating lower back pain. We were concerned that he had water in his lungs and might have been in danger of a “dry drowning.” As it turned out, he was having kidney trouble from where his lower back had impacted a rock in the river.
I would urge whoever is capable of implementing tighter controls on the rafting companies to begin to do so immediately. Lives depend on it.
Anthony Willis is from Jefferson City, Tenn.
