A Washington man plummeted into a partially frozen lake right in front of eagle-eyed police who were coincidentally wrapping up their water rescue training Tuesday afternoon.
Officers with the King County Sheriff’s Office Marine Unit and the Mercer Island Police Department were rehearsing water rescues at Fish Lake in the Cascade Mountains when one of the deputies saw a man fall right through the ice.
“We saw a guy out of the corner of our eye walking back and one of our guys said, ‘he just went through!’” Rich Barton, a sergeant with the sheriff’s office, told KOMO.
The crew had just finished their exercises, but were still dressed in their water rescue gear and equipped to put their practice to use in the real life-or-death ordeal.
“My guys were falling in the ice trying to get to this guy,” Barton told the outlet.
The rescuers spread out their body weight by crawling toward the man, who was thrashing beneath a gaping hole in the splintering ice. They were able to secure him with rescue devices and quickly hauled him to the dock.
The man was shivering from head to toe after his dunk in the sub-35-degree water.
He explained that his two friends were nearby, and he feared that they also would’ve fallen through the ice if the officers hadn’t reached him first.
“We could have had three potential victims who could have perished yesterday,” Barton told the outlet.
The drenched man was taken to a cabin and given dry clothes to change into before he was evacuated by medical personnel, the sheriff’s office told the outlet.
He was able to drive home on his own once he warmed up.
Barton lauded his crew with praise and told the outlet that it likely would’ve taken emergency responders an hour to reach the man had they not been practicing at the lake.
“Right place, right time. I mean, if we had not been there, you would have been reporting on a different outcome,” Barton said.
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