News

Previous Experience Helped Idaho Man Save BASE Jumper

Nathan Brown

05/14/2015

May 14—TWIN FALLS—A California woman was unhurt Tuesday afternoon after spending about a half-hour dangling hundreds of feet above the Snake River from her stuck parachute.

Carla Jean Segil, 26, of Big Bear, was BASE jumping off the Perrine Bridge around 5:30 p.m. when a gust of wind caught her chute and blew it into the bottom trestle of the bridge, the Twin Falls County Sheriff's Office said. It got stuck near the top of the archway that holds the bridge up, Lt. Daron Brown said.

Segil was left dangling 10 to 15 feet below the trestle.

When Brown got there, Chad Smith, the special operations director for Magic Valley Paramedics, was already there and had gotten himself into a harness. Rescue crews attached a rope to him and lowered him, via a tripod that was anchored to a pickup truck parked on the bridge, to where Segil was hanging.

Smith attached Segil to him with a rescue harness, and he was hoisted up to the catwalk under the bridge, where a four-person team was waiting. Medics checked Segil out, and Search and Rescue members then retrieved the chute.

Smith said Tuesday's rescue was an adrenaline rush, but it was something he was prepared for. The crew has rescued people in similar precarious positions before -- people who fall over the cliffs overlooking the canyon or rock climbers who get stuck or break an ankle.

"Our tech-level team trains all the time for a high-angle rescue," he said.

The last time a BASE jumper got similarly tangled in the bridge was in 2007. Then, a Twin Falls County Search and Rescue team member was lowered by rope over the railing, and a second team of rescuers hiked along the catwalk to above where his chute had snagged. That BASE jumper, who had suffered three broken bones in the mishap, was then lowered to a boat waiting in the river.

"It was actually the first rescue we'd done like this," recalled Brown. "You might say that it more or less prepared us for yesterday's event. We knew how to do it because of that."

All in all, 30 people from the Twin Falls Fire Department, Magic Valley Paramedics Special Operations Reach and Treat Team and Twin Falls County Search and Rescue were involved in Tuesday's rescue.

Brown disputed the idea that rescuing BASE jumpers is a burden on taxpayers. He said many of the jumpers travel from far away to come to what is a BASE-jumping spot known all over the world. Many of them spend money in local hotels and restaurants, he said, and some of them have even donated money to Search and Rescue.

As Brown and other rescue personnel talked to the media on the trail along the canyon rim below the bridge, a group of Australian tourists was lounging on the grass between the IHOP parking lot and the trail, gearing up to jump. One of them, who didn't want to give his name to a reporter, said he had come to the U.S. just to jump off the Perrine Bridge, and that it was one of the safest BASE-jumping spots in the world due to the river below and the lack of obstacles.

The Twin Falls County Sheriff's Office has responded to 23 BASE-jumping injuries at the bridge since 2006, and eight deaths since 2003.

Jerome County rescue personnel have to respond to a BASE-jumping accident once or twice in an average year, said Sheriff Doug McFall. The county line goes down the middle of the river, and most people who BASE jump off the bridge end up on the Twin Falls side. However, McFall said people sometimes jump off the cliffs on the Jerome County side. The last jumper to die in Jerome County was a man who struck the canyon wall while jumping near Shoshone Falls last summer.

Brown said Twin Falls rescue personnel have to respond to a BASE-jumping mishap maybe a half-dozen times a year. He estimated there are 100 jumps from the bridge on a nice day, making BASE-jumping statistically safer than most other extreme sports.

"The rescuers that were out here were on duty," Brown said. "They're getting paid whether they're out here doing a rescue or sitting behind a desk doing paperwork."