Float into danger
City needs better signage regarding dangers of tubing down river channel, says visitor after harrowing incident
Following a near-drowning last week on the Okanagan River channel, a Parksville woman is calling for better signage to alert tourists such as herself to the dangers of the waterway.
Cheryl Dunfield told The Herald she was among a group of eight people — including her two adult daughters and their two kids — who went for a float on the afternoon of Aug. 16.
Group members scrambled aboard four flotation devices, all of which were tied together, and set off from the Coyote Cruises access point on Riverside Drive.
Dunfield said she noticed a sign featuring several warnings, including one cautioning against tying floatation devices together, but didn’t think much of it, as she’d gone down the channel in similar fashion before without incident. But this time was different. When the group reached the new bridge at Green Avenue, a concrete pillar split the collection of rafts in half. Then the rope connecting them snapped, sending two boats and four people, including Dunfield, down the channel.
That left her daughters and their kids, ages three and five, stuck on their raft against the bridge pillar, helpless against the strong current. “Two grown men with lifejackets tried to jump in and get them; (the men) got sucked under and they came up further down (the river) and my daughter said they looked terrified,” Dunfield continued.
Other bystanders tried to form a human chain to rescue the four, but were also rebuffed by the current.
“Nobody could get to them,” said Dunfield.
“The kids were screaming. They were terrified. They thought they were going to die.”
Finally, her daughters took matters into their own hands.
“The kids luckily had lifejackets on, so each of my daughters took a kid and they jumped into the rapids,” she said, adding they were carried underwater for about 10 metres before resurfacing.
It was only later they learned a 20-year-old man had died in June under similar circumstances after getting hung up on a bridge pillar at Green Mountain Road.
Given the inherent danger of floating with rafts tied together, Dunfield believes signs should be placed along the channel specifically to drive home the message.
The kids were screaming. They were terrified. They thought they were going to die. Cheryl Dunfield
“And maybe there should be some kind of buffer at that bridge,” she added.
Besides the sign with multiple warnings posted by the City of Penticton on Riverside Drive, the only other caution is a notice on the Coyote Cruises price board that recommends patrons not tie their tubes together.
The Penticton Indian Band, which owns Coyote Cruises, did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
City manager Peter Weeber said the local government, which doesn’t have jurisdiction over the channel, was “very proactive in our joint messaging with the band” earlier this summer following the drowning to alert people to the dangers posed by tying rafts together and floating in fast, high water.
Weeber agreed with Dunfield, however, that there should be a warning sign on the bridge at Green Avenue, and said he’d investigate the possibility of installing one there.