Haines Volunteer Fire Department volunteers, good samaritans and a satellite communication device combined earlier this fall to rescue a severely injured resident after an airboat accident left her, her parents and four dogs stranded on the upper Chilkat River.
Nicole Holm was at the helm of her father’s airboat on Sept. 11, headed to moose camp to prepare for the hunting season, when debris beneath the river’s surface pushed the boat into a fallen cottonwood jutting out from shore across the water, a river hazard known as a sweeper, Holm said.
“I came around a corner. I was getting too close to the shore. I was trying to get out of it, and kind of looked up and saw brush there,” Holm said. Then she noticed the fallen tree, about 2.5 feet in diameter and four feet above the water, and tried to change direction but couldn’t.
“The boat was stuck on these trees (underwater) that ran me on a rail right into the sweeper,” Holm said. “At that point there was nothing left to do. I knew we were going to hit, and it was what it was.”
Holm’s father, Shane Horton, said he lunged for the boat’s steering arm, but it was too late. “We were still going 25 mph, and we had about 30 feet before we were going to hit,” he said.
He was worried his wife Janis, who was sitting on the left side of the boat, nearest shore, would be hit by the sweeper, but he and Janis (and all four dogs) were able to avoid it, and weren’t injured in the accident. He looked back, he said, and saw Holm pinned under the log, not moving or making a sound.
After helping Janis up the steep bank, Horton returned to the boat, which had begun to sink, not knowing if his daughter had died.
Colliding with the sweeper shattered Holm’s kneecap, broke several bones including her hip and ribs and gashed her leg. It also caused the boat to take on water from the back and sink.
“I didn’t want to move her (Holm) but the boat was going down,” Horton said. He assisted his daughter to the front of the boat and, with the help of a rope, he and his wife lifted Holm ashore and up the bank.
Soaked by a fire Horton built, the three awaited help from rescuers they had summoned with a Garmin inReach — the same kind of satellite communication device that assisted in the U.S. Coast Guard rescue of three paddlers stranded on the Tsirku River last year.
“I would highly recommend: don’t run the river by yourself. And get an inreach,” Holm said. “That was just invaluable. To know somebody heard me. To know somebody knew we needed help.”
Within 20 minutes of pushing the SOS button on the inReach, Horton said he received a response from state wildlife trooper Colin Nemec. He was also able to communicate with his son, Tyrell Horton, who assisted with the rescue, and Holm’s husband. Within two hours of the crash, Tyrell and Robin Stickler, who was at the launch with a jetboat when Tyrell showed up, were on the scene, Holm and Shane Horton said.
“I thought that was just pretty damn remarkable,” Horton said. He said if it weren’t for the inReach he would have had to swim a few channels downstream to get back to the landing and seek help.
A crew with the Haines Volunteer Fire Department and a state trooper also responded to the accident, assisting the rescue with a stretcher and ambulance.
The crash happened at around 12:30 p.m. Sept. 11 about a mile or two downstream from where the Kelsall River feeds into the Chilkat. Seven hours later, Holm said, she was on a medevac flight to Anchorage. She underwent surgery at Providence Medical Center, where she spent a week recovering before returning to Haines.
About three weeks after the original accident, Holm was medevaced to Juneau, she said, because the gash behind her knee got infected and she developed sepsis. But she has recovered since and is back at work, she said. (She’s a registered nurse at SEARHC.)
Shane Horton said on Wednesday he hadn’t been able to retrieve the boat yet due to high water conditions this fall but he planned to go Thursday and attempt to lift it out of the sand. He said in the 40 years he’s been running the river he hadn’t experienced a major wreck until this one.
“We’ve spent years and years (there). Every year we take snowmachines up there in the wintertime. And go up there in the summer, and it’s our base,” Holm said, adding that there are always risks on rivers and in the woods in Alaska.
She said her whole family uses inReach devices but for both Holm and Horton this was the first time they had to use one in an emergency situation. Holm said she and her mother were delayed leaving town on their way to the river because they were searching for the device.
“It could have been really easy for us to say we can’t find it, we don’t know where it is, and to go anyway,” Holm said.