Four people were rescued off a boat ‘teetering’ at the edge of a Texas dam, police say – CNN

 

(CNN)When police in Austin, Texas, responded to calls about a boat at the edge of Longhorn Dam earlier this week, they found it teetering over the edge — with four people aboard.

The group was rescued Thursday with the help of the Austin Police Department’s lake patrol unit and other first responders. But the situation could have been a lot worse if the officers hadn’t shown up so quickly, authorities said.
“This would have been very tragic had they gone over the dam,” Austin Police Department Assistant Chief Scott Perry said in a Friday news conference. “It’s a very high dam and there would have been probably severe injuries if not loss of life due to that.”
The group, which was visiting from out of town, was touring Lady Bird Lake on an electric boat Thursday afternoon and got close to the dam’s spillway, Perry said.

They were distracted and didn’t notice the boat had passed two marked buoys notifying them to turn around, officer Bradley Smith, with the police department’s lake patrol unit, said during the news conference. Smith was one of three Austin lake patrol officers who were part of the rescue.”

By the time they realized they were almost at the dam, they tried to turn around to avoid it but the suction was too powerful and pulled them against the dam,” Smith said.

Source: Four people were rescued off a boat ‘teetering’ at the edge of a Texas dam, police say – CNN

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