Two drown during Memorial weekend
SEATTLE – A man died after a canoe capsized on the Olympic Peninsula and a woman drowned in the Green River after falling from a raft southeast of Seattle during the Memorial Day weekend.
Authorities also were searching for a man from Tacoma who vanished after trying to swim to his loose boat in the Columbia River near Vantage.
Hot weather and cold water, common in the late spring and early summer when rivers run high with snowmelt, can be a deadly combination, said Dan Shipman, a Coast Guard safety specialist.
“Sudden cold-water immersion is a phenomenon that is becoming more recognized as a cause of death as compared to hypothermia,” Shipman told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “That’s why life jackets are so important, because you float instead of struggling.”
Even a life jacket was not enough to save Douglas R. “Oly” Olson, 48, of Port Angeles, who died after a canoe capsized Monday on Lake Mills, the 451-acre reservoir behind Glines Canyon Dam on the Elwha River about 10 miles southwest of Port Angeles.
His companion, Elizabeth Meyers, 42, of Olympia, who had been with him in the canoe, was chilled but did not appear to be injured, Olympic National Park officials said.
Olson probably saved Meyers’ life by helping her into the swamped canoe and staying in the chilly lake for fear that it would sink under the weight of both, park spokeswoman Barb Maynes wrote in a news release Tuesday.
Park Superintendent William Laitner said 25 mph winds generated waves 1 1/2 to 2 feet at the south end where the canoe overturned.
Hillary Fluke and Greg Allen told the Peninsula Daily News they were fishing on the lake when they saw the canoe sticking up in the water near the south end and notified park rangers, who found a woman on shore pointing to a man wearing a life jacket in the water.
They said they helped pull the man into a park boat, but it was too late.
“He was so cold,” Allen said. “He was out there a couple of hours before we got there, and that water is so cold.”
At Flaming Geyser State Park east of Auburn, King County sheriff’s deputies said two 20-year-old women went rafting on the Green River with one personal flotation device and decided the less-experienced boater would wear it. The one with the life jacket survived but the other drowned Monday night when they fell off the inflatable raft.
At 52 degrees, the water was so cold that “even as quickly as we got here, within minutes, there was nothing we could do,” sheriff’s Sgt. William M. Hurley told KOMO television
The woman who died was identified Tuesday by the county medical examiner’s office as Morika Y. Johnwanson, of Kent.
In the Columbia River, divers searched without success for Russell Fortman, 28, of Tacoma, after he reportedly went after a boat that got loose in high winds Saturday night off Vantage Point.
Witnesses told Kittitas County sheriff’s deputies he swam about 50 yards, called for help and then vanished from sight about 9 p.m. The boat was later found on some rocks, but divers could find no sign of him. The search was continuing Tuesday.