By Maddie Hanna
The Boston Globe
ASHLAND, N.H. — A 7-year-old Rhode Island girl died while trapped underwater in her family’s sport utility vehicle for more than two hours Thursday while firefighters rescued her mother and 5-year-old brother from the middle of a brook surging with flood waters.
The family’s Ford Explorer was swept into the brook after a flash flood hit the Ames Brook campground early Thursday evening. The girl’s father, mother, and brother managed to escape from the car before it rushed into the brook, 1,000 feet downstream.
Ashland Fire Chief Tom Stewart said when firefighters rescued the parents, they told the rescuers that their daughter was trapped in the vehicle.
“They had a good idea she was still in the car,” he said.
Ashland Deputy Fire Chief Brad Ober said he did not know how the other family members were able to escape.
Authorities did not release the names of the family members because the parents requested privacy and wanted time to tell relatives about their daughter’s death, said Ober.
The cause of death was drowning, according to a press release issued by the state Marine Patrol Bureau that also said the family had been trying to cross a swollen stream.
Firefighters responded at 6:16 p.m. Thursday to a 911 call from someone at the campground. About 70 firefighters from more than 10 communities, including a regional swift water rescue team, arrived at the campground.
About a half hour after the first firefighters arrived, they found the father standing on one side of the brook, which had swelled from 20 feet to 300 feet wide, Ober said.
“He was pointing at [the vehicle], so he knew where it was,” Stewart said. “The water was making such a loud noise you couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he was screaming at the top of his lungs.”
Shortly afterward, firefighters spotted the mother in the middle of the brook, holding her unconscious son and clinging to a tree, Ober said.
Firefighters rescued them about half an hour after they got the father to safety, Ober said.
All three were taken to Speare Memorial Hospital in Plymouth.
The 5-year-old was transferred to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, said Ober, who did not know his condition.
After they rescued the mother and son, firefighters did not find the car for more than an hour until flood waters receded. “As fast as it came, it left,” Stewart said.
The SUV was totaled, he said, after traveling 1,000 feet, hitting rocks and trees.
“The sheer force of the water was unbelievable,” Stewart said.
Firefighters had seen the SUV submerged earlier, Stewart said, but decided to rescue the mother and son first because the water was rushing so fast.
“We could see the mother and son, so everything was directed toward that mother and son,” he said.
“We didn’t have enough resources to perform both functions at the same time,” Ober said.
Stewart said that in the noise and confusion, rescuers heard conflicting reports from witnesses at the campground.
“We didn’t know how many cars we had in the water, how many people we had in the water,” he said.
Firefighters evacuated 29 people from the campground. Most were able to return yesterday.
People walking through the wooded, hilly campground yesterday afternoon said they did not know the family, but some had heard the father screaming.
“The man was yelling, `Help! Help my family,”’ said Stacie Brown, 43, of Uncasville, Conn.
She and John Vendola, 42, also of Uncasville, were walking Brown’s dog yesterday and stopped to look at the family’s campsite. They pointed to a spot on a small brook that runs into Ames Brook where a bridge had been.
The bridge was washed out in the floods, which carved a 5-foot deep, 10-foot wide gash into the sandy ground.
Brown and Vendola said they were standing on the opposite side of the brook from the father, who was standing in his underwear and T-shirt, screaming. Brown and Vendola said they had told him not to jump in.
“It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” Vendola said.
Copyright 2008, The Boston Globe