RescueVoices.com - Everyday Heroes - Xavier Escobar

Capsized boat 'Good Samaritan' speaks

Reported by: Tim Malloy Email: tmalloy@wptv.com Photographer: Blain Logan Last Update: 5/28 7:01 am

Click on the video plater to the right to watch the story BOCA RATON, FL -- "I wasn't going out, it was too rough" Dr. Xavier Escobar grew up surfing off the Boca jetty. His decision to take out a friend's Sea Doo on Memorial Day at six in the evening was on impulse. When he swung out of the channel into the open sea, he heard screams. "They were in the middle of the break, with white water all around them." Escobar found himself in the middle of a frantic fight for life. Six people were thrashing in the Atlantic, their boat overturned. They were drowning in a rip tide a hundred yards offshore. Escobar swung the Sea Doo around and plucked a young boy who was gripping the bow of the violently heaving boat. "I went over to pick him up. He didn't respond. I yelled at him and pulled him in. He said his family was out there." By then the Coast Guard and Boca's Marine unit were circling the victims and pulling them from the water. Escobar went back out. "They looked at us like we were angels,” says Escobar. All survived. Two were hospitalized. http://www.wptv.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=2af98a2e-6f13-4071-a4e8-00852e111468

RescueVoices.com - Getting Recognized

With large thanks to Shawn Alladio of K38 Rescue, RescueVoices.com is getting some excellent exposure.

We have been on Surfersvillage.com, GlobalSurfNews.com, PWCToday.com and more!

Rescuers, keep your stories coming!

Everyday Heroes - Paul Patterson and Anthony Navi

Sea cadet's daring rescue saves man's life

Life-savers .... Paul Patterson and Anthony Navi.

27 May 2008

By Andy Hughes

TWO sea cadets were praised today after their heroic actions saved the life of a man who had who fallen into the Tyne.

Commanding officer Paul Patterson was on board Hebburn Sea Cadet's boat TS Kelly when he spotted the man falling into choppy waters near the cadets' building in Prince Consort Road Industrial Estate at about 5pm on Sunday.

Mr Patterson immediately alerted cadet Anthony Navi, who was stationed in a safety boat nearby in case of an emergency.

The 22-year-old hurtled full speed towards the TS Kelly boat where Mr Patterson, 47, leapt aboard as the safety boat soared past at 25mph.

After locating the struggling 38-year-old man, who was floating down the river, the two cadets managed to pull him out of the Tyne and on to their boat where they gave him first aid treatment. He was then taken to shore where the paramedics were waiting for him.

The pair have been hailed "heroes" by their colleagues and the emergency services.

Neighbourhood Sergeant Ed Hedley, of South Tyneside Area Command, said:
"The actions of the two men were very praiseworthy."

But Mr Patterson, from Chester-le-Street, played down his role, saying: "We were only doing our job."

He added: "We're trained to rescue people like that all the time and you just switch on when you have to.

"You expect other cadets falling into the water, but not just a member of the public.

"He was really struggling and he seemed unconscious, so when we pulled him out he was just dead weight."

The local man, who is thought to have been out with friends by the riverside when he fell, suffered no injuries but was taken to South Tyneside District Hospital as a precaution. Police and fire services also attended the scene.

Mr Navi, from Hebburn, said: "I heard somebody shouting for help, then I saw Paul waving me to come over, so I went full speed towards him and he just leapt on from one boat to another – it was unbelievable.

"Then we went straight to the man in the water and managed to fetch him out. It's lucky no one was seriously hurt. It could have turned out really bad."

Chief petty officer Sheila Harte said: "Paul was absolutely fantastic. The way he dived on to a moving boat in those choppy waters was amazing, it's unheard of.

"He had no fears about jumping on the boat. The emergency services were here very quickly but he had been rescued by that point."

A spokeswoman for Humber Coastguard said: "We had a call just after 5pm from a gentleman reporting somebody had fallen into the Tyne.

"We launched the Tynemouth inshore lifeboat and the Sunderland coastguard team also went to assist.

"But another boat in the area managed to help the gentleman out of the water and he was taken to hospital by ambulance."

• Last Updated: 27 May 2008 5:25 PM
• Source: Shields Gazette
• Location: South Shields

Everyday Heroes - 2-year-old Saved After 15 Minutes in 42 Degree Water

Frigid water may have saved boy, experts say

2-year-old who still clings to life after falling in lake might have gone into a form of 'mini-hibernation'

By Jeremy Manier and James Janega |Tribune reporters

10:33 PM CDT, April 21, 2008

The odds of survival seemed thin Friday for a 2-year-old boy who fell into the 42-degree waters of Lake Michigan and was submerged for at least 15 minutes before divers retrieved him and took him to a hospital.

Yet the child's young age and the frigidity of the water may have saved him from drowning, medical experts said. The boy remained in critical condition Monday at Children's Memorial Hospital, though his family requested the hospital not release more details about him, including his name.

Research into similar incidents in the last three decades has shown that children can survive submersion in cold water for up to 66 minutes in one extreme case. One reason may be their tendency to respond to such submersion with what amounts to a form of mini-hibernation.

In what some experts call the "diving response," breathing stops, the heart beats more slowly and the body diverts blood from the extremities to the heart, brain and other organs where it's needed most. That reflex may help children more because their internal temperature can drop faster than an adult's—a cue for their metabolism to slow down.

"If this were you or me, they'd be putting flowers on our tombstone right now," said Robert Pozos, a professor of biology at San Diego State University who has researched how people survive such extreme cases of hypothermia in water.

A fast response from the Chicago Fire Department rescue crew may have helped the boy survive. A helicopter with two divers aboard happened to be minutes away at Midway Airport when they heard the wind had blown a boy into the lake. Officials said the helicopter reached the scene in four minutes, shortly before another team of department divers and a paramedic crew arrived.

The first diver into the harbor, Brian Otto, said he spotted the boy's hair waving in dark water beside him within three minutes after he dropped from the helicopter. When divers handed the toddler, still strapped into a jogging stroller, to paramedics on the ledge above, the boy's body was pale and ice cold.

Drowning is a leading cause of accidental death among children, and most cases of prolonged submersion end in death. But being submerged in cold water can elicit two very different responses, which can affect whether the person survives.

One is the cold shock response, which many people have instinctively as soon as they feel icy water on their face. The victim gasps, then hyperventilates, leading to increases in heart rate and blood pressure.

"The heart is working hard and pretty soon you tire yourself out, and you're more likely to drown," said Dr. Dave Beiser, an emergency physician at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

The other reaction is the diving response, so named because it resembles some of what happens to mammals such as whales and dolphins when they swim for long distances underwater.

But the diving response alone is not enough to ensure survival, Pozos said; it must be accompanied by a drop in internal temperature. A fast drop is possible in children because they have a higher ratio of surface area to weight, meaning cold water cools the body more quickly than it would for an adult.

Pozos also believes many children are aided by swallowing or breathing in cold water, which helps cool their internal organs and slows their metabolism.

Once a child gets to a hospital, doctors must be careful not to attempt rapid warming, said Dr. Russ Horowitz, an attending physician in the emergency department of Children's Memorial, who was not involved in the 2-year-old boy's care.

"We have to bring them up nice and slow," Horowitz said.

Friday's frightening scene brought up tense memories for Terrence Tontlewicz, whose son Jimmy, now 28, fell though the ice into Lake Michigan in 1984.

"God, it's pretty much the same thing that happened to us," said Tontlewicz, who now lives in Utah and has not seen his son or ex-wife in years. News reports a decade after the accident said Jimmy attended a school for disabled children, was active in the Special Olympics and lived an otherwise normal teenage life.

About one-third of children who endure cold-water submersion suffer long-term neurological damage, Horowitz said. The chances for recovery are relatively good for children because their brains are still growing and retain much of the plasticity that people lose as they grow older.

Research also suggests that children stand a better chance of survival if they fall into very cold water—less than 50 degrees Fahrenheit or so. Warmer water will not trigger the diving response or lead to a slower metabolism.

For most children, the limit of survival after submersion in warm water is about 15 minutes.

But in the most extreme case of cold water survival ever recorded, a Salt Lake City toddler lived after being submerged in cold water for 66 minutes in 1986. That girl, Michelle Funk, appeared blue and lifeless after being pulled from an icy creek, and her internal temperature was as low as 66 degrees.

But after hours of the hospital team administering warm fluids and warmed air and putting her on a heart-lung bypass machine, the girl revived. Bit by bit, she regained her sight, her speech and fine motor control. By the time the Utah doctors published a medical journal article on the case in 1988, the girl had essentially returned to normal.

jmanier@tribune.com

jjanega@tribune.com

Every Day Heroes - Dolphins

Dolphins save surfer from becoming shark’s bait

A pod of bottlenose dolphins helped protect the severely injured boarder

By Mike Celizic

TODAYShow.com contributor

updated 6:57 a.m. PT, Thurs., Nov. 8, 2007

Surfer Todd Endris needed a miracle. The shark — a monster great white that came out of nowhere — had hit him three times, peeling the skin off his back and mauling his right leg to the bone.

That’s when a pod of bottlenose dolphins intervened, forming a protective ring around Endris, allowing him to get to shore, where quick first aid provided by a friend saved his life.

“Truly a miracle,” Endris told TODAY’s Natalie Morales on Thursday.

The attack occurred on Tuesday, Aug. 28, just before 11 a.m. at Marina State Park off Monterey, Calif., where the 24-year-old owner of Monterey Aquarium Services had gone with friends for a day of the sport they love. Nearly four months later, Endris, who is still undergoing physical therapy to repair muscle damage suffered during the attack, is back in the water and on his board in the same spot where he almost lost his life.

“[It] came out of nowhere. There’s no warning at all.

TODAY Todd Endris

Maybe I saw him a quarter second before it hit me. But no warning. It was just a giant shark,” Endris said. “It just shows you what a perfect predator they really are.”

The shark, estimated at 12 to 15 feet long, hit him first as Endris was sitting on his surfboard, but couldn’t get its monster jaws around both surfer and surfboard. “The second time, he came down and clamped on my torso — sandwiched my board and my torso in his mouth,” Endris said.

That attack shredded his back, literally peeling the skin back, he said, “like a banana peel.” But because Endris’ stomach was pressed to the surfboard, his intestines and internal organs were protected.

The third time, the shark tried to swallow Endris’ right leg, and he said that was actually a good thing, because the shark’s grip anchored him while he kicked the beast in the head and snout with his left leg until it let go.

The dolphins, which had been cavorting in the surf all along, showed up then. They circled him, keeping the shark at bay, and enabled Endris to get back on his board and catch a wave to the shore.

Our finned friends
No one knows why dolphins protect humans, but stories of the marine mammals rescuing humans go back to ancient Greece, according to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.

A year ago in New Zealand, the group reports, four lifeguards were saved from sharks in the same way Endris was — by dolphins forming a protective ring.

Though horribly wounded, Endris said he didn’t think he was going to die. “Actually, it never crossed my mind,” he told Morales.

It did, though, cross the minds of others on the beach, including some lifeguards who told his friend, Brian Simpson, that Endris wasn’t going to make it.

Simpson is an X-ray technician in a hospital trauma center, and he’d seen badly injured people before. He had seen Endris coming in and knew he was hurt.

“I was expecting him to have leg injuries,” he told Morales. “It was a lot worse than I was expecting.”

Blood was pumping out of the leg, which had been bitten to the bone, and Endris, who lost half his blood, was ashen white. To stop the blood loss, Simpson used his surf leash as a tourniquet, which probably saved his life.

“Thanks to this guy,” Endris said, referring to Simpson, who sat next to him in the TODAY studio, “once I got to the beach, he was calming me down and keeping me from losing more blood by telling me to slow my breathing and really just be calm. They wouldn’t let me look at my wounds at all, which really helped.

A medivac helicopter took him to a hospital, where a surgeon had to first figure out what went where before putting him back together.

“It was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle,” Endris said.

Six weeks later, he was well enough to go surfing again, and the place he went was back to Marina State Park. It wasn’t easy to go back in the water.

“You really have to face your fears,” he told Morales. “I’m a surfer at heart, and that’s not something I can give up real easily. It was hard. But it was something you have to do.”

The shark went on its way, protected inside the waters of the park, which is a marine wildlife refuge. Endris wouldn’t want it any other way.

“I wouldn’t want to go after the shark anyway,” he said. “We’re in his realm, not the other way around.”

Rescue Voices - Everyday Heroes - May 26, 2008

May 26, 2008, 10:19PM
Houston man saves nephew, but drowns in Brazos River

Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

A Houston man drowned in the swift current of the Brazos River on Sunday after saving his 9-year-old nephew, who was pulled to safety by a stranger, authorities said.

Francisco Garcia, 41, was in the water at Bryan Beach, near the mouth of the river, with his nephew on Sunday about 3:50 p.m. when the boy started to lose footing, said Freeport Police Department Sgt. Juanita Cardozo. She said Garcia also started to struggle in the undercurrent, and held his nephew above water.

On shore, Garcia's wife and the boy's father — and their extended families — called for help as it became clear they were drowning, Cardozo said. A "Good Samaritan" on a jet ski was able to take the boy from the uncle and bring him to shore, said U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Renee C. Aiello.

The uncle disappeared under the water. His body was recovered at 6:20 p.m.

Cardozo said Garcia's extended family had made an outing to the beach every year for the past six years.

Boating Safely Continues Beyond May 23rd

National Safe Boating Week officially ends today, May 23, 2008. However, this does not mean it isn't just as important to use caution when boating every day.

This Memorial Day make it a choice of yours to wear your personal flotation device (PFD), also knows as life jacket, every minute you are on the water. The safest driver is a defensive one. Most fatal boating accidents happen because people do not wear their PFD.

Don't let this be you.


To read more about fatal accidents told first hand by rescuers, click here.

Be safe out there. To coin a phrase from Shawn Alladio, world renowned personal watercraft instructor, "The life you save may be your own."