‘Risking their lives’: Tow truck drivers get RV out of Portneuf River

POCATELLO – In all of Mark Lindholm’s 44 years of experience, he had never arrived on a scene quite like the one he did on Wednesday evening.

It was around 5:15 p.m. when Lindholm and two other tow truck drivers arrived at the dead-end on West Bonneville Street, responding to a call from the city of Pocatello. Area tow truck companies are on a rotating schedule to volunteer company time and respond to calls from the city, and this time the call came into Denny’s Wrecker Service.

“You better come look at this. We have an interesting one for you,” recounted DeAnn Wilson, owner of Denny’s, of the call she got from the city.

RELATED | RV crashes into Portneuf River with two adults and a dog inside

When Lindholm, his son, Kayman Lindholm, and Jerry Sartin arrived at the job, they found a crashed RV sitting in the Portneuf River. This job would have already presented extra challenges. Even without the high concrete wall they would have to lift it up and over. The vehicle had stopped in the concrete channel that runs through Historic Downtown Pocatello.

Lindholm arrived on the eastern side of the river, where he saw that emergency personnel were rescuing a woman from the RV, which had broken through the fence on the other side of the channel.

Once the rescuers had finished the difficult job of getting the occupants out of danger, Lindholm could start working on the task he had been called out to complete.

“Great, I’ve got something big and long and something that’s going to halfway break apart,” Lindholm thought.

As the team waited for the area to be clear enough for them to move their equipment in, Lindholm started to devise a plan for accomplishing this feat.

The emergency

The neighbors were alerted to the situation when they heard a loud crash around 4:45 p.m.

One neighbor, who declined to share her name, who was inside her house at the time of the incident recounted the events to EastIdahoNews.com. After hearing this, she and her family ran outside and saw that the fence that went along the wall of the channel was tipped over but still attached to the concrete.

“We didn’t know what had happened at that point, and that’s when we heard that guy and a girl screaming for help,” she said.

Someone dialed 911, and others ran over to the channel, but then they stopped hearing screams and feared the worst.

“Are you OK?” they asked.

“And he says, ‘I am, but my wife’s not. My wife can’t breathe’,” the neighbor said. “Get us help, get us out of here!”

Some of the people who had run over to the channel started to see if they could cut the fence to drop a ladder down the wall, but then emergency services arrived and took over.

Pocatello firefighters, police officers and paramedics responded. The responding officers blocked off the street and alleyways, while firefighters and paramedics carried out a rope rescue, setting a ladder down on the RV, cutting a hole in the roof to access it.

The rescuers carried tended to the occupants of the RV, while others lifted the dog out of the channel. The man was able to climb up the ladder himself and the woman was lifted out in a stokes basket.

According to Lt. Josh Hancock with the Pocatello Police Department, the driver said the brakes on the RV failed, causing the vehicle to crash into the river.

Kim Stouse, public information officer for the fire department, said that the woman was transported to the hospital by 5:35 p.m., and Hancock said her injuries were non life-threatening.

The long haul

After the rescue, Lindholm put his plan in action.

Looking at the crash, one thing was immediately clear to him.

“It had to go out the way it came in,” Lindholm said.

Once the area was clear, the team moved its two large tow trucks and one small truck to the other side of the river to stage the extraction. Using the ladder, Lindholm got onto the roof of the RV and then climb down the ladder attached on the back of the vehicle to access an ice shelf on the side of the river.

One of the trucks lowered its hook down so that Lindholm could attach it to the trailer hitch, lifting the bumper high enough for him to place chains on both sides of the rear frame rail. They then brought cables down to both sides of the RV and “raised the back of the motorhome up to the point we could get it up to look at it a little bit better.”

At that point, Lindholm placed two more chains, one on each side of the rims of the rear tires, allowing both trucks to hook in with their second cable.

“So then each truck, we would lift one side a little bit, go to the other side, would lift that truck a little bit, to the point where we could lift the motorhome up,” Lindholm said.

As they continued to hoist the RV towards the top of the wall, he unstrapped the cables on the rear tires and hooked them at the front of the frame, giving the trucks more leverage.

After some time, the team made enough progress to get the back of the frame up to the top of the concrete wall. But then a creaking noise made a problem evident.

“The body started to pull away from the frame because it had torn loose,” Lindholm said. “It looked like it was going to fall off and land in the river.”

Hannah Sanger, the Pocatello science and environment division administrator, spoke to what the consequences would’ve been.

What could have happened?

“If it fell apart and we had pieces of RV that were floating down (the river), we’d be retrieving those over the course of the next year,” Sanger said.

Having this debris in the river would’ve affected both the wildlife and the ability of people to recreate downstream.

“Fish and wildlife would be, perhaps, ingesting pieces of it because it breaks into smaller and smaller pieces, and that makes its way through our ecosystem,” Sanger said.

The debris from the RV would have likely been caught in other debris jams farther down the river.

“That would make floating the river significantly more dangerous, and it would create debris jams you could get trapped in, and that’s not good for anybody, wildlife or human,” Sanger said.

But the most immediate concern would’ve been the potential for gasoline to leak out of the RV’s tank.

“It would need to be removed. (It would) contaminate the water and some of its chemicals can dissolve in the water,” Sanger said.

‘What are you doing?’

Securing the RV’s body to its frame was a risky move.

Lindholm attached a strap to one side of the frame and crawled up onto the rear of the vehicle while it was still dangling so he could bring the strap all the way around the roof.

“People are watching, going, ‘What are you doing?’” Lindholm said. “Well, I have to do something because I’ve got to secure it.”

After Lindholm got the strap around the top of the RV, he was able to get off its rear and secure the strap on the other side, preventing the body from falling.

“I put myself in an unsafe situation, but I did what I felt was necessary to make sure that we didn’t have further problems,” Lindholm said.

At that point, the crew was able to work the RV the rest of the way up and over the concrete wall, to the applause of the neighbors who were still outside watching. Authorities said they accomplished this by around 8 p.m.

“We clapped for them when they were done, and then they looked at us and kind of laughed,” the neighbor said. “I’m like, ‘Well, good job, guys.’”

“It was a huge sigh of relief, that we managed to do what we did without losing things or without having to clean up more of a mess,” Lindholm said.

The neighbor who spoke to EastIdahoNews.com was impressed by the efforts the team made to extract the vehicle from the river in one piece.

“They’re risking their lives out there, just trying to get this RV out,” she said.

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