Swiftwater Search and Rescue pulled the body of a missing boater from the Bulkley River on Thursday evening, ending a day long search that earlier seemed unlikely to be resolved.
On June 9, emergency coordinators were on alert after calls were received of a man in the water in Telkwa. At 8:30 in the morning police, firefighters and Search and Rescue volunteers, and people from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans were combing the water for any sign of the man, who had gone missing in the water shortly after the calls.
Bulkley Valley Search and Rescue (SAR) President Barry Finnegan said that the man was initially spotted in the water by an island just downstream of where the Telkwa River meets the Bulkley.
“We started our search from just above that and worked our way down stream,” he said.
The search turned up nothing for the first hour but the boat turned up at approximately 9:30 a.m.
“At 9:30 we picked up the pontoon boat and a bunch of the equipment that was with the boat coming down stream just above a point call Tatlow Falls.”
He said a boat searched the water and people were on both shores, searching for any sign of the man.
“It was a relatively straight forward search because we had good eyewitness reports from people in Telkwa,” he said. “Knowing where he was last and having a really quick response from us and the Telkwa Fire Department ... really helped contain the search.”
By noon, the search had yet to turn up anything so SAR decided to call off the search until more information was received.
“In the evening, about 5:30, we got the call a body had been spotted downstream of Smithers.”
Just upstream from Riverside Park he said the search concluded when they located and retrieved the body.
The man’s family has been notified and a name is not being released.
According to RCMP, he was not wearing a life jacket when found, although Finnegan said that a life jacket was discovered in the river when they found his boat.
Finnegan said that it is a particularly dangerous time for anyone on the river right now. That’s because even though water levels may be dropping, that actually causes even more dangers than just high water.
“The problem is that right now as the water starts to come down the river will get more character. You’ll get bigger waves, you’ll get more things starting to happen in the water,” he said. “When it’s up in flood it’s fairly flat.”
While they don’t know for sure what caused the man to fall into the river, he thinks that the changing river was a contributing factor.
“It looked to us like the fellow involved had rafted the river quite a few times this spring on the same little boat and what we’re thinking was that as the river did start to come down with more character, more waves in the water, that’s maybe what caused him some problems.”
He said future boaters and rafters in the river should use more caution this year because he said it looks like the water will stay higher for much longer this year.
“As the days get hotter and kids get out of school and people want to start tubing and rafting down the river there’s a lot more debris than there was and it looks like there’s going to me much higher water for much longer this summer.”
He said there were several incidents last year of people getting into trouble in the stretch of river between Telkwa and Smithers.
“People need to really use caution and even boaters need to use caution because there’s gravel bars where there weren’t before and there’s debris in the water.”