Staff
Sweet Home firefighters rescued a 13-year-old boy who was stuck chest-deep in the mud at Calkins Park, where the South Santiam River flows into the Foster Reservoir.
The boy, Kolby Keenon of Sweet Home, was stuck in extremely unstable mud about 100 feet from shore.
Firefighters responded at approximately 12:50 p.m. on March 22.
“Basically, we had to make some some makeshift platforms to get him out,” said paramedic-firefighter Josh Starha, the first medic on the scene. Trying to get out to Keenon, “I was sinking myself.”
He called the station for more backboards to create a makeshift bridge.
Someone else on the scene had rubber mats, and Starha used them to reach Keenon by alternately picking them up and placing them in front.
When backboards arrived, the firefighters created the bridge, Starha said. Once they reached Keenon, they created a platform they could use to pull him from the mud.
He was about waist deep, Starha said. He had one leg trapped underneath him. It took three or four firefighters to pull him out.
He was “suction-cupped in there,” Starha said. “It was pretty tough to get him out. Where he was it was just like a big hole.”
Every time rescue workers scooped away mud, it would refill, he said.
Keenon put on a personal flotation device, and rescue workers pulled him across the standing water to the shoreline.
It took about 50 minutes to free the boy, Starha said.
The family declined to comment but Keenon told Portland’s KPTV that he and a friend had been fishing and he became trapped when he tried to move to a different area to fish. He was uninjured.
Doug Shank, a local geologist and volunteer firefighter, hasn’t been to the site, but he said there are two phenomenons which can cause people to sink into the soil.
“One is quicksand,” he said. “It’s a sand-sized material, fairly fine, with water moving up through it, like in a spring.”
The sand isn’t exactly floating, but it’s also not compacted, Shank said.
The other is in saturated silt-sized material, finer than sand, which is found where rivers flow into reservoirs, Shank said. Up at Menear’s Bend, the South Santiam deposits gravel. As it reaches the reservoir, it deposits silt. At the dam, the finest soil, clay, is deposited.
It’s the same concept as lique-faction from the vibrations of earthquakes, Shank said. In the case of mud, it’s vibrations from walking through it.
The vibration increases water pressure in the saturated soil, causing soil particles to move readily with respect to each other, reducing the strength and stiffness of a soil.
“The water starts to come out because of the vibrations,” Shank said. “You start to sink. The more you struggle, the more you sink.”
Usually, it’s not very deep, he said.