Firefighter’s survival termed a ‘miracle’
By Dave Greber Staff Writer
Dayton Daily News
Copyright 2007 Dayton Newspapers, Inc.
HAMILTON, Ohio — Firefighter Chris Gabbard sloshed around at the base of the city’s low-level dam April 17 for several minutes before his helmet and life vest were ripped off by the torrent.
Then the 32-year-old Gabbard went under, unconscious and trapped by the turbulent boil created by the water’s rush over the dam, according to a report released Tuesday by the Hamilton Fire Department.
The department’s water rescue recertification training suddenly had become more than an exercise.
One other firefighter, 35-yearold John Hansbauer, already had been plucked from the rushing Great Miami River downstream. Two other firefighters were marooned on a nearly capsized boat that sent Gabbard and Hansbauer into the water.
As firefighters struggled to tug the boat out from the pull of the boil, Gabbard surfaced, tangled in the mess of rope attached between the bobbing watercraft and the ambulance ashore.
Then firefighters did what they do best, according to Fire Chief Joseph Schutte: They saved a life.
After he was cut free from the rope, Gabbard needed the breath of others three times between the water’s edge and the hospital before being declared medically stable. He slipped into a coma from which doctors feared he would not return.
“I think if Chris was not tangled up in that rope and he was not retrieved when we did, we would have been doing a body recovery,” said Hamilton Deputy Chief Steven Dawson Tuesday morning.
“And some people may call it luck, other people would call it the hand of God. That was the start of the miracle, that Chris went from basically being dead to being alive and hopefully coming back to the job again.”
The account of the moments that led up to and after the mid-April training exercise were part of the preliminary investigation released just more than two months after the accident occurred. A final examination could take up to a year, Schutte said.
The report provided some answers to why a recertification training the department had done six times prior went so horribly wrong.
Gabbard, a father of two, nearly perished because the primary boat involved in the “two-boat tether” exercise traveled too close to the boil and the distance of rope between the two boats was not adequate, according to the report. The combination prevented the boats from being able to free themselves from the dam’s relentless draw.