Bill swam into the intake of a diversion dam. The moment you hit the grate you're pinned and can't move a muscle because a swimming pool's worth of water is flowing through the grate every couple seconds. It doesn't really look that bad until you see something stuck against the grate... or you are stuck against the grate. And then it looks really really bad. I mean, I didn't figure it would be a picnic but Yikes!! Who put this thing here? Could we get a more gentle angle on these steel bars at least? The grate works well for keeping logs out of the pipe but people got to breathe and that's a little hard if you're pinned and you're underwater.
I had air, luckily enough, as my life vest had kept me above water when I hit the grate, but for the most part water was coming over my helmet and I was breathing in the little tube of water created by my head and couldn't see except for moments here and there where the surge would let off. I just chilled out and breathed a couple minutes and waited for my friends who saw me in trouble and jumped out of their boats running. I know just what they were thinking upon seeing me pinned against the grate, and that was, "HOLY SHIT!" What I had imagined was that I'd be able to crawl over to the ladder on the left, which when I arrived at the grate was 3 feet away. No dice. I couldn't move a freaking inch. It didn't help that my leg was popped through the grate about a foot below the water level in this picture. The grate widens there to about 3.5 inches. A rope appeared at my face and I grabbed it with the fingers of my left hand and my friend pulled but I couldn't hold on.
My right arm was completely useless as I had just popped my shoulder out of place in a failed roll which had precipitated this whole crisis In the 50 times I've run this rapid I've never gotten NEAR this grate as it's super easy to avoid if you're in your boat. The rope appeared again and I thought, "hold on if you want to live." I wanted to live so I held on and yelled. That time they pulled me up about a foot and a half so my chest was out of the water but I couldn't get my knee out of the grate and that's basically where I stayed for the next 45 minutes. I was a little uncomfortable but not particularly freaked out as I could breath and I figured the dangerous part was over with. We moved the ladder over to where it appears in this picture, and my friends tied a line to my life vest so I could relax and hang against it, and I tried and tried to get my right leg out by putting my left leg on the ladder rung and stepping up but I was trapped.
Then my buddy Josh climbed down the ladder on the right and tried pulling it out with me, even going so far as to PUT HIS HEAD UNDER WATER to grab my right foot and pull it out of the grate but even with such heroics the right knee could not physically fit through the grate. I'm left to wonder how it got in... I think the shape of the knee as well as the force of the water are the answer. After half an hour of this I saw there was no way out but for someone to come along with some heavy machinery and cut the bars out or something, so I just chilled in the water awhile more till the fire department came... about 30 to 40 minutes into it I believe. Response time was a bit quicker than it would have been as there was a guy from the irrigation company happened to be there finishing up some maintenance work when I got stuck. He had a phone.
Anyhow, the irrigation guy shut off one of the intakes, which was handy, I thought they were going to have to shut off the dam upstream.... would have been 8 hours till the flow decreased. Shutting off the intake was quicker and easier. Wonder why I didn't think of that. Anyhow, that cut off the flow by a half, which decreased the pressure on me by a ton. In fact, these pictures are where I'm feeling relatively no pressure anymore. They came down the ladders with the Jaws of Life (cue heavenly chorus) and proceeded to spread the steel bars. Wow. Can you see how beefy these bars are? they are 3/8 inch thick and three inches wide. At first they had that thing awful close to the family jewels, and my thigh had gotten so swollen that I couldn't slide down the bars at all, but after a few minutes the bars spread a millimeter and I could slide further away and they could get the Jaws in a better spot also. A few more minutes and then it spread about 1/4 of and inch and I was free! Hooray! I'm glad I pay taxes now!
It took several minutes in the sun till I stopped shivering, as my temperature had dropped to 95 degrees. But the sun was out and raging and by the time the paramedics had done taking my vitals I was warm. They warned me the newspaper and TV listen to the scanners so they wouldn't be far behind, and sure enough before my friends were done helping to open the intake valve again ( electric motor was busted so it was 20 minutes of hard cranking on a little wheel) the news was there and I was really too mortified to talk but I talked anyhow. Many thanks to my loyal crew of kayaking buddies who knew how to handle ropes and look out for each other and for me while they attempted to extricate me from the grate. I was really feeling the love.
