By Rick Pfeiffer
Lockport Union-Sun & Journal
NIAGARA FALLS —
Two men step carefully into the swift water of the Niagara River rapids, just over 100 yards from the brink of the American falls.
The water is moving as fast as 30 mph over a river bed of rock and slippery shale. By any standard, it is a dangerous place to be.
They are not thrill-seekers or stunters nor are they misguided tourists hoping for “a closer look” at the falls.
Wearing over-sized floatation vests and using metal poles to help guide them over the river bed and give them support against the raging water, the members of the New York State Park Police Swift Water Rescue team are training for a day they hope will never happen.
The reality is, it already has and probably will again.
“If someone ends up in the rapids and manages to grab on to a rock or get up on one of the islands, who would go out and get them?” Park Police Lt. Patrick Moriarty asks. “We would.”
In order to reach someone caught in the rapids, the rescue team will need to “walk” out into the fast-moving water and establish a guideline that will allow them to work in the treacherous currents. The guideline is secured on a main island, on this particular day of training it’s Green Island, and then stretched across the water and secured to one of the smaller islands in the middle of the rapids.
While other officers wait on the shoreline and hold tightly to the guideline, prepared to pull the two lead team members back if they have to, those officers walk and swim the line out to a small out-island. They move through water that ranges from ankle to waist deep, shooting over rocks and other debris while dealing with a river bed of silt or algae-covered shale.
It’s not an easy trip.
“It’s real intense,” says Park Police Sgt. Clyde Doty. “But this is critical. This is the staging point. Once we get this line up we can island hop to wherever we need to go.”
With a guideline established, officers can then reach a potential victim, attach a a lifeline and pull the person back to the shore. Of course that also means the team members need to be able to get a person of any size over the rocks and debris and through the crashing waves without having them go under the water.
Moriarty admits the training is demanding and may not be for everybody but he calls it absolutely essential.
“Not a whole lot of people go and do this stuff,” he said. “But this is invaluable training in case someone goes into the water either accidentally or on purpose. You gotta have a way to go into the water and bring (a victim) back.”
Park Police officers here first began training for swift water rescues in 1993.
“You can’t wait for the emergency to happen and then try to figure out (what to do),” Moriarty said. “This is so dangerous. The Niagara River is unforgiving. You can’t make a mistake.”
The veteran lieutenant said that was a point of emphasis when Park Police officers first received their rescue training. The experts brought in to teach the first training exercises took them to Cazenovia Creek in South Buffalo and demonstrated the techniques they needed to learn.
“So we’re in the creek and they say to us, ‘if you (aren’t in the right position) just swim out down river and do it again,’ ” Moriarty recalled. “We told them, ‘You can’t do that here. There is no second chance.’ ”
The two lead members get their guideline established and the rest of the rescue team begins moving out into the water. Even though they are tethered to the guideline, you can see them fighting to walk through the water while their legs are battered by the current and the waves.
Moriarty says the team used to ask the Power Authority to lower the water flow over the falls when they were training, so that moving through the rapids would be a little bit easier. They don’t do that any more.
“Now we leave it as is because we’ve got to able to do this in any conditions,” Moriarty said.
The team members reach the first out-island and then begin “hopping” to other out-islands to explore what’s out there. They find debris that was probably lost overboard from any number of boats and then swept down the river.
In a sheltered cove, they spot a duck. Otherwise the only other life on the islands are insects, primarily “large biting ants.”
As daunting as the trip out into the rapids was, the return to the shoreline is no easier. It is, in fact, more difficult because the officers are actually walking up and over the river bed rocks.
Lt. Peter Radwanski hits a particularly violent spot in the water and he sways for a second on the guideline.
“It’s amazing, the force of that water,” he says as he reaches the shore. “I could feel it (hitting me) and I just said to myself, ‘I’m not going down, I’m not going down.’ ”
None of the officers “went down” in this training. Moriarty called his officers’ walk in the rapids “a success.”
