Rescuers need rescuing from river

    PALMER — Three teenagers hoping to help friends in trouble had to be rescued themselves after two hours on an SUV in the Matanuska River.

    Christal Cope, 18, said she was camping this morning when she saw a group of her friends with their own SUV in the river. She thought they were stuck. So she and two friends decided to go see if they couldn’t pull the boys out.

    She said she was tossing rocks most of the way down to check the river’s depth, but the one spot she didn’t check ended up being the one in which her 1994 Ford Explorer got stuck.

    “If I had just thrown one more rock this would not have happened,” she said, while drying off on the river bank.

    One of her friends, Jessica Entsminger, 17, tried to swim to shore but ended up in water up to her neck and was almost swept under a log. Cope said she went to help. And that’s how the pair of them wound up sopping wet, Entsminger standing on the log and Cope on the Explorer’s bumper. A third girl, Sarah Keller, 16, stayed in the car, periodically bailing water out the passenger window.

    The girls tried to call a tow truck, Cope said, but none seemed to want to come out without money up front. The $50 she had with her didn’t quite make the nut. A woman camping with her family on the beach placed those calls. Cope said she doesn’t know who ended up calling for an emergency response but she was glad they did.

    “It was like 11,” when the SUV got stuck, Cope said, “And no one even showed up for an hour and a half.”

    Palmer Fire Chief John McNutt said he got the call at about 12:30. By about 1:30 the girls were out of the river, in ambulances, being checked for hypothermia. None of them were hurt.

    “It was deeper than what she thought,” he said of the river.

    He said his crews had some throw bags — sacks of rope useful in water operations — but didn’t have life jackets or other water rescue equipment on their rig. So they kept up a conversation with the girls and waited for the borough’s dive team.

    Once the dive team showed up and had donned their dry suits, McNutt said it wasn’t much longer before the girls were on dry land again. That’s about when the boys showed up, cracking jokes about needing a pirate flag.

    Cope said that at some point she called the Dairy Queen manager and told him she might be late for work. Standing on the riverbank at mid-afternoon she said she’ll probably be in when her shift starts.

    “I have to go to work,” she said. “I have to pay for this.”