A man and woman on inflatables were rescued from Santiam River on Saturday evening.
The couple was floating on rafts down a “really inaccessible point in the river,” said Firefighter Randy Whitfield. Whitfield said one of the rafts went flat, and the man hurt his leg.
“I think what happened is he came around a corner and rammed a rock with his leg, and it really hurt him,” Whitfield noted.
Rescuers struggled to locate the pair at first.
“We couldn’t find them, so we started bracketing ourselves and working our way up the river,” Whitfield said.
After being unable to find the pair, the crew blew air horns and ran their sirens to see if the people could hear them.
Eventually, Whitfield and Volunteer Firefighter George Virtue went through someone’s barnyard on Bennett Lane to access the river from there. After hollering for a bit, the two found the man and the woman.
“We had to cross a fence, and then it was about 25 feet down to the river. But the briar berries are old growth. They were 8 or 10 feet tall,” Whitfield said.
The woman reported to the rescuers that the man had hurt his leg and was unable to move, so the crew started cutting through the berries. The embankment was fairly steep down to where the man and woman were on the river.
The man was put in a stokes stretcher, while the woman was able to get to safety into one of the rigs.
After the man was pulled ashore, he was transferred to Linn County Health in a medic unit.
“It worked really well. The guy was very cooperative,” Whitfield said of the property owner on whose property the rescue took place.
“He let us go out there and do our thing, and even let the fence down a little bit so we could get the gentleman over the fence.”
It took about an hour for the crew to carry the man through the briars.
Whitfield said there were probably 11 or 12 people involved in pulling the man out.
“It worked out well,” Whitfield said. “He was happy, we were happy.”
But, he added, “it was a long, hot night. Everybody was sweating pretty hard by the time we were done. It was about 10:30 p.m. by the time we got it finished.”