Are we going to wait until there is a drowning on Putah Creek before a known hazard is easily removed? Elizabeth Case did an extraordinary reporting job on the dangerous incident on Putah Creek earlier this month. Elizabeth even did great homework on finding out who could remedy the hazard.

I found all of Carrie Shaw’s and Rich Marovich’s “do nothing” responses to the hazard to be particularly weak and irresponsible. The strainer referred to, and seen in the video, should obviously be removed. Now! A near-death experience by the first woman sucked under the strainer should be a fair warning of what might happen to the next person caught there. There was also an abandoned red cooler caught in the swift water nearby that did not belong to the three women. Somebody else may have crashed at the site as well.

Doesn’t the Bureau of Land Management Act also safeguard recreational rivers? Or, perhaps a service club, like the Kiwanis, could do the necessary deed. The only equipment needed is a chain saw. Or, how about Friends of the River, “the voice of California’s rivers”? Maybe they could develop an action plan. Or a reader out there may have a better idea.

One of the three women in this incident had a fascinating story to tell me. Last year a horse fell on her right leg and broke the femur in five places. The scar from the operation to put a metal shank into her leg was gruesome to see. Before she thought she would die under the mighty Putah strainer, she felt that the force of the current would break her leg yet again. Fortunate indeed that she was flushed out to live on, and tell her story.

George Farmer

Davis

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