Dive team works to rescue stranded man

PALMER — It was a very busy 24 hours for the Mat-Su Borough Dive Rescue Team.

At 4 p.m. Sunday evening, the team was dispatched to Mile 93, Glenn Highway responding to a report of a woman who’d fallen out of a boat on what was reported as the Matanuska River.

“It was actually on Gravel Creek, five miles up Gravel Creek,” said

Dennis Brodigan, the Mat-Su Borough’s director of Emergency Services.

Turns out that the woman’s companions had managed to pull her out and all of them were leaving the area on foot. But there wasn’t a good way to communicate between rescuers and the group.

Also, the borough’s airboat couldn’t make it farther than a mile up the creek.

“Later this morning we finally made contact with everybody. They were fine, they all refused treatment and transportation,” Brodigan said Monday.

That was at about 11 a.m., Monday. Immediately thereafter, the dive team was dispatched to Jim Creek. Alaska State Troopers were also heading out there.

“It sounds like a guy overturned his ATV, his four-wheeler in the Jim Creek area,” said trooper spokeswoman Beth Ipsen. “Palmer EMS can’t get to him because of high water so there is an Alaska Wildlife Trooper on the way out there on an ATV.”

Brodigan said the man who rolled his ATV might have a fractured ankle. The dive team will hopefully be able to get medics to him.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.