Elderly Man Survives Icy Immersion
Friday, December 04, 2009 at 13:31
A 70-year-old man went through the ice in Pinehouse Lake this past week and survived, despite spending 45 minutes in the frigid water.
Kelly Natomagan got a call from his nephew Logan last Friday afternoon, saying that his father George had gone through the ice while he, Logan and one of Logan’s friends were snowmobiling on the lake.
The two boys were able to make a quick escape by avoiding the weakened patch of ice, and phone Logan’s uncle.
George sat in the icy water for 45 minutes, while his son devised a way to get him out.
In the end, Kelly found both a snowmobile and a canoe, paddled out to his father in the canoe, and pulled the boat out with the snowmobile.
Natomagan says that amazingly, his father is doing just fine, with only minor injuries resulting from clinging onto the sunken snowmobile in the dark.
“He’s doing all right now. He only remembers to that point where I was going towards him. He doesn’t remember the rest. He woke up in the cabin two hours later,” he says.
The trio took the elder Natomagan to a cabin and warmed him until they could get him to emergency personnel located on a road a short ways away.