Texas game warden knows first-hand the importance of boat safety.
This weekend, for the first time in his 17 years as a Texas game warden, Zak Benge won’t be where he wants to be: in a boat on public water in eastern Texas, working throughout the three-day Memorial Day holiday weekend like almost every one of the state’s 550 or so game wardens to ensure and improve recreational boating safety on what always is one of the biggest and, unfortunately, most dangerous boating weekends of the year.
Benge will be at his home in Houston County, recovering from an incident that underscores just how quickly a boating accident can occur, how it can happen to even the most seasoned and careful boater, and how following safe boating practices and being prepared to deal with problems on the water can be, quite literally, the difference between life and death.
‘Going to the river’
On April 2, Benge launched his state-issued aluminum johnboat onto the Neches River from a primitive ramp on private property to which he had access. He’d told his wife, Seema, he was “going to the river.” She could expect him home around dark.
The day was clear and pleasant and the Neches, while a bit swelled from recent rains, was not as high and fast as it was a couple of weeks prior when Benge had received a call that sent him to this same isolated stretch of the river in the middle of the night. A group of about 30 folks, almost all of them international college students, had launched canoes and kayaks onto the Neches, quickly found themselves in trouble and desperately needed help.
“A lot of them — most of them — had never been in a canoe before. They were totally unprepared,” Benge said. The river was up, the current fast and the channel of the narrow Neches an obstacle course of fallen trees, snags and other obstructions. The group made poor time in the dangerous conditions and darkness caught them before they reached their planned take-out location. The group took refuge in a flooded creek and used a cellphone to call for assistance. They were lucky; they were in one of the few spots along the isolated section of river where a wireless connection was possible.
Benge found the stranded, wet, cold group and, with he and other game wardens ferryed them to safety, finishing the job around midnight.
Such things are routine for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department game wardens. Water rescues, searches for lost or missing boaters, responding to and investigating boating accidents and drownings, as well as patrolling to enforce the state’s water safety laws are a big part of a Texas game warden’s duties. They spend a lot of time in boats.
“Last year, Texas game wardens spent about 546,000 hours on recreational boating safety work. It’s a major component of what we do,” said assistant commander Cody Jones, who heads marine law enforcement for TPWD’s law enforcement division. And, increasingly, a lot of that work involves wardens interacting with boaters in paddlecraft — canoes and kayaks.
Use of paddlecraft has exploded over the past decade as Texans have taken to the portable, relatively inexpensive and enjoyable humanpowered boats. But many of those users are inexperienced or ignore basic boating and water safety rules. In 2015, almost half (46 percent) of the 32 boating-related fatalities in Texas involved paddlecraft, Jones said. One of those incidents, in which four people drowned after overturning their canoe, occurred on Houston County Lake. Benge responded to that incident in his county. None of the victims, including a 6-year-old, was wearing a personal flotation device (PFD, or life jacket), he said.
Such experiences reinforce what all Texas game wardens know: wearing a PFD is crucial to boating safety. A 2015 U.S. Coast Guard study indicated 85 percent of people who drown in a boating-related incident in the United States that year would be alive today if they had been wearing a life jacket. An adjunct Coast Guard study found only 6.1 percent of adults in open motorboats wore a PDF when the boat was underway.
Texas law doesn’t require anyone except those under 13 and those on personal watercraft to wear PFDs. But it does require every boat have at least one PFD for each person on the vessel. Texas game wardens wear PFDs whenever they’re in a boat; their rules mandate it.
Game wardens are also required to have their boat’s engine cut-off switch lanyard attached to the boat operator when the boat’s underway. The cutoff switch, most commonly called a “kill switch,” shorts the engine, killing it, when the lanyard is pulled. This is crucially important when a boat or motor hits an obstruction, has a mechanical malfunction, is hit by a wave or otherwise suffers an incident where the boat operator loses control of the boat’s steering and throttle and is thrown away from the helm. This often results in the operator or passengers throw into the water. Without a kill switch, the uncontrolled vessel will continue running, usually turning in a continuous circle that brings the boat and its deadly spinning propeller on a collision course with those thrown in the water.
Benge had his PFD on and kill switch attached when he was patrolling the Neches on April 2. He ran the river, checking kayakers and folks out fishing for white bass or catfish.
About 4:30 that afternoon, Benge headed back upriver. It was a path he knew well. After all, the 40-year-old had grown up navigating East Texas rivers and lakes in flat-bottoms powered by tiller-steered outboard like the 25-horsepower one shoving his boat that day. He’d started when he was just a pre-teen, learning boat operation and safety from his father and grandfather. He is good at it. Very good. So good at safely operating boats in the often narrow, obstruction filled rivers of East Texas, day or night, that he trains Texas Game Warden Academy cadets in boat operation.
Unexpected trouble
Benge was running smoothly in the 20- to 40-yard-wide channel and not far from where he’d left his truck and boat trailer. He thought his day was about over. It was not.
The outboard’s lower unit hit a submerged stump or maybe the spinning pop clipped a hidden log. Whatever it was jerked the outboard sideways, ripping the tiller from Benge’s hand.
The boat, shoved by the now-wide-open outboard, made a 90 degree turn, throwing Benge the opposite direction. Before he could reach back and grab the tiller, the boat slammed into the river’s bluff bank.
The impact catapulted Benge forward, to the left and out of the boat. On the way, his left knee slammed into the edge of a large wooden gasoline/gear box that sat athwart the boat a couple of feet in front of him.
In a heartbeat, he was in the water beside the boat that had climbed up the vertical bank until it could go no higher, then slid back into the river beside him, the motor swamped.
A flood of things hit Benge’s mind. He was afloat, thanks to the PFD, but he was in water far over his head against a vertical bank that rose 4-5 feet. No way to get out of the water. And his knee hurt.
“When I reached down and grabbed my knee, I thought, ‘My knee cap’s not there’,” he said. It wasn’t. It was in several pieces, all of which had been pulled up his thigh when the impact that shattered the knee cap also severed the patellar tendon that held the cap in place and connected upper and lower leg bones.
His left leg was useless. Benge tread water, held on to the swamped boat and, luckily, found a ball of tree roots under the surface of the water on which he could sit, water up to his chest.
“If I hadn’t on the PFD, I wouldn’t have made it. I had on a 12-15-pound gun belt and other gear.”
He sat on the submerged roots for about 10 minutes. He considered splinting his injured leg and trying to float/ dog-paddle across the river where the bank was sloped. Maybe he could crawl for help.
Then he remembered his smartphone — the one in his pocket that was under water. He retrieved the phone, which, as luck would have it, he’d put in a Lifeproof case a couple of weeks earlier.
The phone worked. And he had a connection — very weak, but a connection. He called the local sheriff ’s office and, after a couple of dropped calls, make contact, explained the situation and exactly where he was located.
Other TPWD wardens and local law enforcement officers scrambled. They found him a couple of hours later, and he was soon on a helicopter to a hospital in Tyler and surgery.
“I wanted to panic, but I didn’t. You can’t in that situation,” Benge said, adding his training and his religious use of boating safety equipment almost certainly prevented things from being much worse.
“Zak was very fortunate,” said Capt. Shawn Phillip’s Benge’s supervisor. “He did everything right. But it proves you how quickly things can go wrong on the water.
“If something like this can happen to Zak, it can happen to anybody.”