By MELINDA WILLIAMS melinda@southwesttimes.com
Members of Pulaski County Public Safety recently spent the day on Gatewood Reservoir. They weren’t recreating, but you could still say they “caught a big one.”
Public Safety’s Special Operations Team was dispatched to the reservoir around 11:41 a.m. Aug. 18 for a report of a vehicle that had rolled into the reservoir at a boat ramp. Upon arrival they discovered a fisherman was unloading a johnboat on a trailer when the brakes on his pickup truck apparently malfunctioned and the truck, trailer and boat rolled backwards into Gatewood.
“The parking brake was still on when we got it out,” Pulaski County Emergency Management Coordinator Brad Wright said of the pickup truck.
While one might think the vehicles wouldn’t be very far from shore, making it easy to pull them out, that wasn’t the case.
“Initially they floated, but when water got into the truck they sank. Somehow they ended up [submerged] on their tops,” Wright said. This left the truck, trailer and 14-foot johnboat in 12-15 feet of water and about 200 feet from shore.
Pulaski Fire Department, members of a dive team from Radford Fire and EMS and a tow truck were dispatched to help remove them from the water. One diver responded at first, but a second had to be requested for assistance.
Wright said visibility is always an issue for divers in Gatewood, but the fact the truck and trailer got into mud on the bottom and stirred it up made visibility worse. But perhaps the biggest problem for the divers was the water temperature, which apparently is still cold.
According to Wright, the entire 250-foot cable on the tow truck had to be used to complete the mission.
By the time each team arrived on scene, divers connected the tow truck cable to the vehicles and heavy downpours delayed work for about 45 minutes, the incident turned out to be a nearly daylong operation. Wright said the items were out of the reservoir by around 5:15 p.m. and the scene cleared around 5:45.
Thankfully, no one was injured, Wright said. He noted the fisherman tried to stop the truck before it entered the water, “so he got lucky.”
By PATRICK FORD patrick@southwesttimes.com
By AMANDA DEAN CCCC Research Intern
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