Stolen by the sea
Twelve-year-old Arunay Pruthi was swept out to the ocean by a ‘sneaker wave,’ said Nora Mishanec in the San Francisco Chronicle—one of many casualties of a little-understood Northern California coastal hazard.
UPON REACHING THE bottom of the steps leading to Cowell Ranch State Beach, 8-yearold Siddhant Pruthi grabbed a fistful of sand and turned to his older brother, Arunay. Ahead lay the Pacific Ocean and an afternoon free of the pandemic’s confinements. “Dadabhai,” Siddhant said, addressing his 12-year-old brother with a Bengali term of endearment. “This is a bad beach.” He was referring to the rocks in the sand, nothing more. The boys’ parents walked over to greet their cluster of friends camped near the base of a cliff. The tight-knit pandemic bubble of four families often met along Northern California’s San Mateo County coast on weekends. This was the Fremont family’s first time at this secluded cove. Sharmistha and Tarun Pruthi chatted with the others while pitching a tent they had brought to shelter themselves from the midafternoon sun on a warm January day. The beach was full of families. They didn’t think anything of their youngest son approaching the water’s edge to feel the cold surf graze his feet.
But the wave that came next wasn’t ankledeep, as previous waves had been. This one blasted Siddhant as he tried to run from it, first knocking him down and then dragging him under. In the split second it took for Sharmistha to turn around, husband Tarun was already sprinting into the ocean. Sharmistha ran after him. She could feel the sand shifting beneath her feet as she threw herself into the water toward her husband and son. Rocked by the force of the oncoming waves, soon all three were immersed in the churning water.
After several attempts to propel himself toward Siddhant during the lull between waves, Tarun could not reach his son. Sharmistha managed to grab hold of Siddhant’s hand, but only for a moment, losing her grip as one wave after another crashed over them. Sharmistha said she thinks she lost consciousness underwater. On the beach, friends and strangers linked arms to form a human chain. Somehow, the group hauled the family onto the sand: Siddhant, then Tarun, and finally Sharmistha. Tarun and Sharmistha lacked the strength to stand. But they had survived. “Arunay is keeping his head above water,” someone told him. The statement struck Tarun as odd. Arunay wasn’t in the water. Sharmistha, surrounded by the strangers who she said saved her life, regained her senses and stood. What she saw as she looked toward the ocean made her want to rush back in: “I saw his head,” she said. “I knew who it was.”
Unbeknownst to the parents, as their attention was focused on saving Siddhant, another huge wave had hit the shoreline and swept Arunay into the ocean. Tarun called out to Arunay, but he knew it was too late. A rip current was pulling the boy farther and farther away.
Dispatchers’ notes in the 911 call log only hint at Tarun and Sharmistha’s agony as they watched their son in the violent surf. “Too far out for anyone on the beach to get him,” a dispatcher noted after speaking with a bystander. Three minutes later: “Trying to stay adrift.” Three minutes later: “Starting to go under for longer periods of time.” Nearly two hours after they had last seen their son in the water, the parents left the beach at the urging of San Mateo County sheriff’s deputies. It was dark as they ascended the wooden stairs to the overlook and walked to the parking lot to be interviewed for a police report and await word on their son. A U.S. Coast Guard helicopter whirred overhead, its roving search lights trained on the ocean. In the place where Arunay had been, the lights found only the sea.
N THE SEVEN weeks before the Pruthi family’s visit to the coast on Jan. 18, seven people had been fatally swept from Bay Area beaches into the Pacific Ocean.
On Nov. 26, the afternoon of Thanksgiving Day, 4-yearold Katherine Huajun Xu of Pinole died after being dragged into the surf on a family outing to McClures Beach at Point Reyes National Seashore. Her father charged in after her and survived. The waves carried Katherine’s body back to shore 45 minutes later.
On Dec. 8, a handyman was on a break from a job in Pacifica when a wave snatched him from the rocks beneath the municipal pier. The season’s horror intensified on Jan. 3, when three members of a Petaluma family were killed at Blind Beach in Jenner. Michael Wyman, 40, drowned while trying to save his two children, 7-year-old Anna and 4-year-old John, who had been swept out to sea. Rescuers recovered Wyman’s body that day. The children’s bodies were recovered two weeks later.
The next Sunday, Jan. 10, saw two more deaths. First, a wave pulled three friends into the ocean beneath Point Bonita Lighthouse at the Marin Headlands; only two made it back to shore. Less than one hour later, 40 miles down the coast, at Pescadero State Beach, a wave overtook Xuanxi He and her husband as they looked for sea urchins. The husband washed back to shore and survived. Xuanxi, her waders filling with water, was pulled under.
Witness descriptions of the wave that pitched Arunay into the surf bore the hallmarks of a sneaker wave: Called “extreme runup events” by scientists, they catch victims by surprise, dragging them into the ocean as the ground beneath their feet “suddenly becomes inundated,” researchers at Oregon State University wrote in a 2018 paper, one of the first attempts to define the phenomenon.
Anyone who has spent time along the
I
Northern California coast has probably experienced waves that arrive during periods of calm and travel far higher up the shore, swamping chairs and towels and sand castles that had seemed well out of harm’s way. Sneaker waves similarly catch beachgoers off-guard, but are rarer events that strike with much more water and with the force to knock adults off their feet.
In any given year, the Bay Area may see one or two sneaker wave deaths. But the period from November to January was deadlier than any stretch authorities had seen before. And they knew the reasons: an unusually high number of sneaker waves, a warm spell caused by La Niña weather, and a flood of families using beaches to escape the pandemic shutdown.
H. Tuba Ozkan-Haller, a professor of earth, ocean, and atmospheric sciences at Oregon State University and an expert in wave mechanics and nearshore hydrodynamics, said she had not heard of sneaker waves until she moved to Oregon 20 years ago. They affect a subset of coastal areas where the continental shelf is too narrow to provide a buffer from powerful waves unleashed by oceanic storms. Aside from Northern California, Oregon, and southern Washington, Ozkan-Haller knows of only one other area with a similarly hazardous submarine topography: Iceland.
No single agency tracks sneaker wave deaths year to year. One reason for the lack of data: Experts shy away from labeling what is and isn’t a sneaker wave, unless they witness the event. Deaths like Arunay’s are rarely attributed to sneaker waves. State Parks labeled his disappearance an aquatic incident; the National Weather Service called it a high-surf death, referring to the category of warnings in effect that day.
Near the stairs leading down to the beach where Arunay was last seen is a small blue sign that reads “Tsunami hazard zone,” accompanied by the image of a cartoon person scrambling to escape an oncoming wave. There is no sign warning against sneaker waves, which strike Bay Area beaches with far greater regularity than tsunamis.
Tarun and Sharmistha never imagined they would lose one son, and almost lose another, to a phenomenon they hadn’t heard of. In the aftermath, they wanted two things: to find his body and to make sure no parent lost a child the same way again.
TARUN AND SHARMISTHA left and checked into a room at the Half Moon Bay Lodge after 10 p.m. The parents hugged their son Siddhant goodbye— “Go with Auntie for the night”—but then returned to Cowell. They brought a blanket and a backpack full of dry clothes for Arunay. He might be waiting on the beach. When they descended the staircase, they encountered two strangers who had heard a boy was missing and were searching the sand. Tarun and Sharmistha joined them, roaming the quarter-mile stretch before heading back to the hotel after midnight. At daybreak, the helicopter returned. Coast Guard search-and-rescue teams use computer modeling to calculate how long a person in distress can survive in open water, accounting for age and body type. Using real-time data from ocean buoys, the teams try to predict where a person would drift.
To avoid unnecessary danger to rescuers, a mission coordinator helps make the decision to end searches when there is no hope. Three hours after resuming operations in the morning, two Coast Guard representatives met the Pruthis at the hotel. There was, they explained, little chance of finding the boy alive. “They were showing us drawings and data and all the research,” Tarun said. “They gave us a bunch of papers.”
The parents could not believe their son was lost. To them, Arunay was still the boy at the dinner table who had, less than two weeks earlier, compared the Capitol Hill riot to the plot of Animal Farm; the son whose interest in politics had grown in the months since his mother took him to a Black Lives Matter protest; the soccer fanatic; the child who alternately fought and played with his younger brother when the coronavirus shrank their worlds overnight.
At 10:20 a.m. on Jan. 19, after 17 hours, the Coast Guard called off its search.
HE SAN FRANCISCO Bay Area coast stretches 148 miles from the mouth of the Gualala River in Sonoma County to the jutting ledge of Año Nuevo Point in San Mateo County. Over millions of years, the surging Pacific has marked its terraced cliffs with coves and caves.
After the official search had ended, the
TPruthis’ circle of friends planned to continue on. One, Maneesh Saxena, set up a fundraising website and a Facebook page called “Search for Arunay Pruthi” that, within days, gained thousands of followers and more than $200,000. Acquaintances and strangers contributed from as far away as India and Germany.
The family hired helicopters to fly low as Eric Jones, a paramedic who had once pulled victims of the Sept. 11 attacks from the Pentagon, and other volunteers peered into each cove to scan for Arunay’s white shirt. A drone operator, meanwhile, took tens of thousands of thermal camera scans of the water. A boat with a sonar tracking device scanned the seafloor.
Each day brought them closer to the sixweek cutoff point at which it becomes unlikely a body will resurface. The volunteers who returned to the water day after day said they sought to give the Pruthi family one thing: closure.
For Tarun, the hardest part of moving on was knowing his son’s death could have been prevented. Shortly after the couple moved to California from Maryland, they took Arunay to the beach in Half Moon Bay, not far from where he would vanish nine years later. Siddhant was not yet born. The family didn’t even think to take sweaters that spring day in 2012, Tarun said. In their minds, the California coast evoked images of beach balls and children splashing in the surf. California schoolchildren regularly rehearse for earthquakes and practice fire drills, yet few leave school with a commensurate respect for the dangers of the ocean. “We just didn’t know,” Tarun said. “We didn’t even think that this could happen.”
In early March, Arunay’s parents commissioned one last flight to look for his body. The helicopter scanned the coast from Bodega Bay to Big Sur. Through the window in the cockpit, Jones pointed binoculars into every cove, hoping for any sign of a body, a T-shirt, a clue.
The day was exceptionally calm. The shadow of the spinning blades danced on the ocean as the helicopter flew over the craggy pinnacles that jut from the water near Cowell Ranch State Beach. The pilot hovered over the place where Arunay was last seen as Jones opened the door and let go of a bouquet—white roses, lilies, and snapdragons bound with twine. The flowers hit the water and disappeared.
Adapted from a story that originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. Used with permission.