A family from Boat Harbour on the Burin Peninsula have a couple of local cabin owners to thank after running into trouble while on a recent excursion in the Long Harbour area.
Brad Denty’s wife Laura slipped on a rock and broke her leg as the family set up to have a lunch near a local swimming hole and waterfall.
The swimming hole where Laura ran into trouble (Submitted)
Denty’s son sought help at a local cabin, but they still needed to get Laura out of the area in order for first responders to reach her.
He says local cabin owners couldn’t do enough to help keep Laura comfortable.
“We got blankets to rest her head against the cliffs. One of the gentlemen, I think he’s 87, he left and went to his cabin and got a pan. We filled that with water and kept filling it with towels and everything to put on her leg, and put her foot into the pan of water. Our greatest fear was that she was going to pass out, or shock would set in. We knew we had to get her out of the sun; we were all dying with the heat.”
He says they managed to get her across the water in a rubber dinghy supplied by another cabin owner, which they fashioned into a stretcher once they got to the other side.
(Submitted)
“One of them actually walked her across the pool; it’s probably about five feet of water there. And after we got her in the rubber dinghy, one of the gentlemen actually walked across the pool with her, guiding the rubber dinghy across to the other side where the rest of us got hold to her and got her up on the cliff. It turned out to be a great stretcher actually….otherwise I don’t know how we would have gotten her across the cliffs that were there.”
He says by the time they got to the road near English Harbour, the ambulance had not yet arrived and they decided to put his wife in the RCMP cruiser for transport to the highway where an ambulance showed up to take her to hospital in Clarenville.
She was later transferred to St. John’s for follow-up treatment. Denty calls the people who came out to help “angels.”
