Icy River Rescue Still Vivid for Conn. Responders

Sept. 27--Hartford Police Lt. Robert Allan leaned over the side of the Bulkeley Bridge to see the man who had just jumped into the partially frozen Connecticut River. About 65 feet down, the man was alive, part of him above the weakening ice, part below.

Allan called for help on his portable radio, launching the most complicated rescue his regional dive team has done in at least a decade.

The operation, around 1 p.m. on Feb. 20, 2014, required members of two groups that don't usually work closely -- police officers and firefighters -- to venture together over partially melted ice. There was too much ice to dive, but too much water to walk normally. Much of the ice was melting and wouldn't support their weight.

They also lacked equipment and, most of all, time.

--As he looked over the bridge railing, Allan was surprised the man was alive.

"I looked over and I was surprised to see that he didn't fully penetrate the ice. His legs and his arms were above. And within 30 seconds, he was moving," Allan said in a recent interview with the fellow rescuers, officers Holly Donahue and Jeffrey Fish, Det. Zachary Kashmanian, fire Lt. Anthony Healis and firefighters Scott Schmitt, Randall St. Pierre and Jeffrey Godlewsky. Officer Eric Baumgarten also was involved in the rescue. The officers, all from Hartford, are members of the Capitol Region Emergency Services Dive Team; the firefighters, also from Hartford, are from Tactical Unit 1. The city council recognized the unusual rescue effort.

When Allan put out the call for help, police and firefighters rushed to the riverbank. Getting there wasn't easy; the access road to the river was covered with snow.

Four of Allan's fellow dive team members rushed to get equipment. While Kashmanian steered a large pickup truck over the bumpy, unplowed road in Riverside Park, Donahue, Fish and Baumgarten were in the back, pulling on bulky, yellow, ice-rescue suits that resemble something astronauts might wear.

"It was very hectic," Fish said.

The firetrucks couldn't make it through the access road's snow. So they went to Columbus Boulevard, near the Connecticut Science Center, and firefighters climbed the stairs leading to the elevated pedestrian walkway. They carried equipment across the walkway, descended more stairs and trudged down the embankment to the river. That part of the trip was at least a quarter of a mile, fire Lt. Anthony Healis said.

When they arrived about 10 minutes later, they and the police had some decisions to make. One was which route to take to get to the man, who was stuck with his legs, arms and head above the ice on the south side of the bridge.

"We decided that the north side of the bridge was probably our best shot at getting to him," Healis said. The ice on the sunny south side was melting.

Allan, Donahue, Fish and Baumgarten from the police department and Schmitt and St. Pierre from the fire department stepped over the railing and went down the embankment to the river. They walked carefully onto the snow-covered ice on the shady north side of the bridge. Their suits' built-in harnesses made it easier for Kashmanian, on the shore, to tether them to a railing and a pickup truck.

They spread out as they walked to avoid putting too much weight in one area. A few hundred feet out, they were parallel to the injured man on the other side of the bridge. Firefighters Schmitt and St. Pierre turned and began to walk under the bridge to the sunny side, with Allan about 10 feet behind them.

Donahue walked back and forth to the shore for equipment, and Fish and Baumgarten stayed near the spot where the three changed direction. They were holding the line in case their fellow rescuers broke through the weaker ice.

Their other job was to maintain a view of both the rescuers approaching the man and those on the shore. This was important because the members of those two groups couldn't see each other, and no one could hear each other; team members had to rely on hand signals.

There's one thing they could hear, though -- ice cracking. It wasn't a short-lived, nuisance noise. It lasted a long time and snapped across a wide area, as if to emphasize the continuing danger they faced with each step.

"At the hole, as soon as we went into the sunlight," Allan said. "You could hear it. And it changed everything that we did."

"It was very slow, and long, and it just didn't stop. You kept hearing it," Allan said. "It kept going."

"I don't know if you heard a noise ..." Allan said to the other first-responders during the interview.

"We heard it," St. Pierre said.

Allan gently dropped to his belly to try to pread his weight around, and the two firefighters followed suit. Allan noticed that the pool of water on top of melting ice -- under the firefighters -- was getting bigger, he said. He remembers thinking, "I don't know what's going to happen. This is probably going to get ugly," he said.

"Considering the resources we had, we wouldn't have been able to rescue them," he said of the firefighters. "We were stretched thin."

Healis said if the firefighters broke through, they'd be "at the mercy of the current," and perhaps swept under ice.

The two lieutenants weren't the only ones worried.

"The deputy that was on scene there was coming up with Plan B," said firefighter Jeffrey Godlewsky, a truck driver, referring to the now-retired Deputy Chief Samuel Goicoechea. Goicoechea was on the bridge, looking down.

Donahue brought the backboard to bring the man to the shore. The rescuers also used flotation devices shaped like the colorful "noodles" children use in pools.

They would have liked to have had a Stokes basket and a raft to bring the man to the shore, they said. Neither was available. The raft "got tied up in traffic," Healis said.

Once the firefighters pulled the groaning man out of the hole and put him on the backboard, they pulled, pushed and carried him to shore.

"It was a combination of everything," Healis said.

"We dragged him until we hit the shade [on the other side of the bridge]," Allan said. Then, they carried him and as they did so, their legs punched through the ice.

"I was hitting other layers of ice," Donahue said.

When they got to shore, after moving 600 to 700 feet over the ice, roundtrip, they put the still-conscious man into the back of the pickup truck with medics. Kasmanian once again drove the truck through the snow-laden road at Riverside Park and they met an ambulance. The man was transported to St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center for treatment and survived for a few weeks but then died.

Back at the river, the rescuers sat down, exhausted and hot.

Their break was brief. They had to gather their equipment and go back to their shifts, they said.

"Reel in the line," Donahue said. "Carry the equipment, move on."

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