A 4-year-old girl is in the pediatric intensive care unit at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta following a boating accident on Lake Oconee on July 4th.
“It’s a miracle that baby is alive,” Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills said Saturday at about 2:30 p.m. “The EMS workers in the ambulance got her breathing, and she was flown to Scottish Rite [sic] and was in critical condition in the pediatric ICU as of about an hour ago.”
According to Sills and reports from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources Law Enforcement Division, the accident happened after a fireworks show over Lake Oconee. Sills said a call came in to the Putnam County 911 Center at 10:14 p.m. reporting a capsized boat.
There were 12 occupants on the tritoon, and all of them went in the water when the boat turned over near the point in Great Waters where Barrington Hall Drive is, according to Sills. He explained that all 11 passengers were at the front of the boat when a wave, presumably from the wake of another vessel or from the combined wake of all the boat traffic, came over the front of the boat. All the passengers panicked and ran to the back of the boat, causing it to capsize, according to the DNR report.
“Everybody in the world was out there because of the fireworks, so they all were trying to help pull them out of the water,” Sills said.
It was discovered that the small child was missing, and an unnamed private citizen — who is a former lifeguard — dove under the boat and located her.
“The boat still had its top on it, so when it flipped over, he had to go down another three to four feet to get under the gunwales and sofas and things,” Sills said. “He found the child up under there. She was under there for about 30 minutes, but she had a flotation device on. She might’ve been trapped in an air pocket. It would stand to reason that there’d be an air pocket when a boat like that turns over because it won’t sink.”
A game warden, an off-duty fireman, and a nurse rotated turns administering CPR to the child until the ambulance arrived and took her to Putnam General Hospital, where the medical helicopter picked her up.
Sills said the pontoon was not over capacity, that it was rated for 15-16 people, “but when you get all the weight on one side in rough water, things like this can happen.”
The others on the boat were rescued by private citizens, game wardens, deputies, and other emergency personnel in their boats and taken to Fishtails Marina, where ambulances took them to a hospital, Sills said. He didn’t know if anyone else was seriously injured. Neither the sheriff nor DNR could say if the victims were local or where they resided.
See the July 10-11 issues of The Eatonton Messenger and Lake Oconee News for more details and updates on this incident.