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Sunday, April 27, 2003

By Lillian Thomas, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Erica and Jason Snyder were out of their inflatable kayak, trying to free it from rocks on the Youghiogheny River at the tail end of a race last summer.

A moment later, Erica was gone. Jason, who had been helping racers in another boat avoid getting stuck in the same place, lost sight of his 26-year-old wife.

Then he heard the yells and saw the hand. Erica was 12 to 15 feet downstream, her body fiercely held in place against an undercut rock by rushing water. Only her hand and part of her forearm were not submerged.

"I jumped feet first and floated to where she was. I saw how bad it was. I opened my eyes underwater and saw her. People who saw her were yelling, but no one [on shore] was getting it."

Jason and Erica Snyder talked publicly about the worst moments of their lives for the first time last week. With the onset of spring boating season and a recent drowning on the same river, they felt that their experience could make clear both the power of the river and the importance of training and safety precautions in boating on it.

The spot where Erica was trapped is called Railroad, the last rapids in a section of the river called the Loop. The boat-takeout point is just below, and many people were already there for the race or as part of recreational boating trips.

Charles Hottenstein was in the boat Jason had helped free. He saw Erica's hand, still grasping the paddle, and began to scream, but the noise of the river drowned him out. He and his racing partner, Tom O'Donnell, couldn't get to where she was, and when Hottenstein looked again, the paddle was floating downstream.

Snyder climbed onto the boulder above his wife. By that time, people had realized what was happening. Someone tossed him a line.

He jumped back in and managed to tie it on Erica's life jacket. He tried to pull her free, but she was held fast against the rock, perhaps by the water pressure, perhaps because her feet were wedged in rocks.

"I saw it couldn't be done by one person," Snyder said, so, exhausted, he swam to shore.

Hottenstein, other racers and river guides from recreational trips converged around the rock.

They were experienced boaters who knew the inverse logic of river currents: Sometimes the only way up is down. To free someone pinned against a rock by water, it's often necessary to push the person deeper into the water to catch a current below that's flowing downstream.

"One person standing on her wasn't getting her out. It took one standing and another pushing," said Snyder. She flushed out and they got her on the boulder and started CPR there, in the middle of the river.

Ohiopyle State Park's July 28 incident report says Erica Snyder was under for three to eight minutes. Jason Snyder realizes that time is hard to judge during emergencies, but he believes eight minutes is at the low end of the range.

In those minutes, though, things were happening.

Bruce King's pager went off in church in Ohiopyle. He headed to the fire hall next door and joined others in his volunteer-firefighter unit. They headed for the takeout, just a couple of minutes away.

Park rangers from Ohiopyle State Park responded. STAT MedEvac pilot Stephen Newark was washing his helicopter and monitoring the Fayette County EMS channel when he heard chatter about a drowned woman.

As bad as Erica Snyder's situation was, everything aligned that day to stop events from spiraling to what seemed to be the inevitable outcome -- her death.

Ranger Charles Brubaker was one of the first to respond to the emergency calls that went out.

"When she came to shore, she was dead," he said. "She was not breathing, her lips were cyanotic -- the blue discoloration -- she didn't have a heartbeat. Clinically, she was gone."

Brubaker's boss, park Superintendent Doug Hoehn, and King's crew from the Ohiopyle-Stewart Volunteer Fire Department were close behind him.

King, an emergency medical technician, had hauled a backboard down the steep slope that leads to the takeout.

"We got her on the backboard, threw her on a rock, and I just happened to be at her head so I got to do the breathing. After about five, six breaths, she took a breath. When she took that first gasp it was like, all right!"

They continued CPR and began to give her oxygen.

When she was stable, they carried her about 75 yards up the hill to an ambulance, which drove the short distance to a landing area where the STAT MedEvac chopper was waiting.

Erica slipped under the water about 10 a.m. By 11:30, she was in the emergency room at UPMC Presbyterian.

Erica has no memory of her accident and only brief "snapshots" of the two weeks before it.

Jason, 28, and Erica, now 27, live in Oakmont with their two sons, 6 and 2. Both have always been athletic. Erica grew up in Michigan around water and had a lot of boating experience. She went to Franklin Regional High School after moving here, and met Jason.

They both attended Michigan State, returning here to live after school. He majored in psychology and works at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Oakland; she majored in economics and is a financial analyst Downtown.

They have been involved in adventure racing for several years. The Pennsylvania Adventure Racers competitions combine several events, typically including mountain biking, white-water boating and orienteering.

Adventure racing is what they were doing that day last summer. Both had been on the Youghiogheny numerous times and had completed a safety-certification course there.

Erica now has a scar beneath her mouth from the breathing tube rescuers forced down her throat. She still coughs a lot. Other than that, she has made a full recovery. She has been boating again and is back at work.

She has pieced together the details of the accident from talking to others, though no one knows what happened between the moment she was working to free the kayak and her entrapment.

She knows what happened afterward, when she was taken to Presbyterian's emergency room, then to Montefiore, which has specialists in treating people like her.

"Initially the news was really bad. They had 'the talk' with my husband. They called out-of-town family members to come."

She had acute respiratory distress syndrome, which can happen to trauma victims, people with severe infections, drowning victims, premature babies and people who have inhaled toxic gases.

"It has a significant fatality rate" she said -- about 40 percent, according to the American Lung Association.

"Things were bad. Very bad," said Jason, who almost never left her side, reading and talking to her.

"What else are you going to do but hope for the best?" he said. "The doctors expressed the requisite pessimism. Who in their right mind is going to promise it's going to be OK? But there was just no choice but to think she was going to get better."

The ARDS recovery rate improves significantly if the patient makes it through the first 48 to 96 hours, Erica said.

She made it.

After about a week in the hospital, she begin to briefly regain consciousness.

"I remember the clock. And the white board with the date on it. I was having a hard time understanding that it had been a week and a half."

Doctors were still expecting a long recovery period. "They were saying, 'She's going to have to learn to comb her hair. ... She won't know who you are.' They were looking at inpatient long-term care facilities. So when I woke up and was who I'd always been, it was amazing."

She was hospitalized for 16 days. She wanted to be home with her children, so she argued to continue therapy there instead of staying in the hospital.

She had sore ribs from ligament damage done during the resuscitation, almost no voice because her vocal cords had been stretched by the breathing tube, a continuing cough and periods of "cloudy thought."

"Most of that I rectified myself by reading, by going back to work part time. The brain is like the rest of the body -- it atrophies if you don't use it."

As for the part of her brain that has erased or hidden the time surrounding her accident, she has mixed feelings.

"People say, 'Be glad.' It's easy for someone else to say. I'm an inquisitive person by nature. The science of it eludes me.

"I don't think I want to remember the accident itself. That part might be a gift. I think the missing parts before the accident will come back. Every once in a while I have a flash. I remember the kids on bikes that day -- that's a snapshot. I remember one of the paddles was really bent."

Both Snyders view her rescue and recovery as the results of good preparation as well as some luck.

"There were people who had swift-water rescue training there," Jason said. "People who knew emergency services in the area and how to get them there. By the time she boarded the helicopter, she was in the best hands she could have been in." She was taken to UPMC, a national leader in ARDS research and treatment.

Had the accident not occurred at a point where the ambulance could easily get close to shore, or had the rescuers not started CPR while still in the river, things could have gone differently.

"Everything just went boom-boom-boom," Brubaker said. "I doubt if everything will ever go this well again. The angels were smiling that day."