Taking a rescue boat onto the Kennebec While waiting to go home after working the day shift at Bath Iron Works a call came to the Safety Department that someone had seen a person on a house rooftop floating under the Carleton Bridge in Bath. Bill Harvey and I donned our exposure suits and went to the dock to launch the safety rescue boat. Went we first left the shore it wasn't too bad traveling, but once we cleared the ships and got into the open river we realized that it was like nothing we had experienced before.

The speed of the water going down the river was faster than I had ever seen it. The best way to describe the boat in the river was it was like it was traveling in a big bowl of corn flakes. The rescue boat had to be cut back to half power due to the river being full of debris of every unimaginable type.

We got to the floating house and determined that nobody was on the roof. At this time we were 2/3 of the way across the Kennebec River. On our way back to the dock the engine started to behave badly. It was shaking and vibrating badly which made us have to slow the engine in the water even more than we wanted to. When we got back to shore and hoisted the boat back onto it's davits we could see that the outboard propeller blades as we suspected were mostly gone having been destroyed by debris.

Upon returning to the Safety Shop I gave my wife a call to ask her to come from Pittston to BIW to take me home because I had missed my ride. She was low on gas and couldn't get beyond the ice cream stand on Rt. 27 in Randolph due to the road being flooded to get more gas. She then went to Richmond to get fuel only to find that the bridge had been closed. Finally, after traveling around the detoured bridges and flooded roads while low on fuel she was able to get to Bath.

Seth Lawrence