National Post (National Edition)
Girl, 12, clings to tree branch after fall in frigid creek
In the pitch black of night, the water-covered roadway seemed passable. But the white 4x4 pickup truck stalled and began to fill with water, and a powerful current separated the father at the wheel and his 12-year-old daughter.
She was yanked into fastrunning creek Hansen Creek, swollen with spring runoff outside Ste. Rose du Lac, Man.
The girl was carried at least 100 yards, but she caught hold of a tree branch and clung to it as she floated in the frigid water for, by one estimate, nearly an hour. Firefighters, tethered by ropes, waded neck deep to bring her to safety just after 10 p.m. Saturday.
Rescuers found her father on the roof of his truck across the creek from the girl, not knowing where his daughter was.
“We can’t believe this little girl had toughed it out or whatever that long, hanging there,” said Daryl Vandenbosch, fire chief in Ste. Rose du Lac.
As the 12-year-old girl recovers in hospital, the local RCMP detachment has launched an investigation into the events that led to her being swept into the current and subsequently treated for hypothermia.
The harrowing rescue has also sparked questions over whether the low-lying roadway was appropriately barricaded, when springtime thaws and rainfall have caused the creek to overflow this year and in recent years past.
This, too, is under investigation, said Corporal James Munro of the RCMP’s Ste. Rose du Lac detachment.
‘‘ There’s still a few key people we need to speak with to find out whether they were or not,’’ he said. ‘‘We’ve spoken with a few people but we haven’t spoken with everyone.”
Area resident James Rath attended the late night rescue and helped bring the father — who has not been publicly identified by police or fire officials — to safety. Mr. Rath said there was no barricade on the south side of the road, which is close to his home about a kilometre and a half from the rescue site.
When his girlfriend went horseback riding along the main rural road outside of Ste. Rose du Lac around 2 p.m. Saturday, the water was about a foot high on the road. Mr. Rath went out around 8 p.m. and saw it had risen significantly, he said.
“At that time the barricades weren’t put up and they should have been,” he said. “Somebody should have been there that morning to see that the water was already coming up.”
Mr. Rath said he did not check the north side of the road — the direction from which the father and daughter were coming — but road crews usually erect barricades on both sides of the floodedout roadway.
At the time of the rescue, the water across the road was as high as the truck’s bumper — which doesn’t seem that high, Cpl. Munro said. But the current was swift.
Mr. Rath said he got a call from a firefighter friend around 10 p.m. Saturday asking to borrow his canoe. But conditions soon changed and rescuers had more of a need for his front-loader tractor.
‘‘He was just kind of disoriented on the truck,” Mr. Rath said. ‘‘He could talk to his daughter but he didn’t know where she was.”
The girl, the father and the two firefighters were taken to hospital with various stages of hypothermia. All but the girl have been released.
“I’m proud of my guys. They jumped to help right away and ... roped up and they went into the water, the two of them, and the one went right up to her,” Mr. Vandenbosch said. ‘‘He was about up to his neck in the water and got her off the tree and got her back to shore.”
It is still unclear how long the girl was clinging to the tree or how long the pair had been stranded before help arrived, although Mr. Rath said he thought they were out there between 45 minutes and an hour.
As it continues to investigate, the RCMP in the town about 200 km northwest of Winnipeg is also treating the rescue as a teachable moment.
‘‘I just really want to tell people not to drive through any open water like that if it’s going across a roadway or a bridge, just so this doesn’t happen to anyone else,” Cpl. Munro said
The father did not respond to requests for comment Monday.