
Six hours later they retrieved the body, one leg still firmly trapped. They couldn't pull her loose and they were numb with cold. Opalka gave her a tube to breathe through as the water covered her head but she was suffering from hypothermia and unable to hold it for long.
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Opalka and paramedics fought against the mud, the rushing water and the cold to free her. The tide was at her chest and she was panic stricken. He ran across the flats to where Adeana Dickison was trapped and assured her that the rescuers would get her out. and Jay Dickison later told rescuers he had been trying to free his wife for two or three hours.Īlaska State Trooper Mike Opalka arrived at the scene first. Jay Dickison found some tourists and one drove up to the Tidewater Cafe at Portage to call for help.
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"They just didn't know that, "Hey, this is going to be full of water in a few minutes.' "īy then, the tide was coming in, filling the slough with icy, glacier runoff. "I don't know if that's when he went for help or tried to dig her out some more," Rohling said.

Before he could get the other leg out, a belt on the dredge slipped. The couple had a dredge for placer mining and Jay Dickison used it to pump the mud away and free one of his wife's legs, according to Harold Rohling, assistant chief of the Girdwood Volunteer Fire Department.

It's not clear what happened next, but Dickison and her husband, Jay, apparently tried to push it and in the process, she became mired in the mud herself. The fourwheeler got stuck in a deep tidal slough. The tide was low and they began to cross the broad, gray, rippled mudflats. They planned to mine for placer gold in a nearby creek. Early on the morning of July 15, she and her husband drove a fourwheel allterrain vehicle down a trail near Ingram Creek, just south of Portage. Nothing illustrates that better than the death of Adeana Dickison. An unknown number of duck hunters, clammers and others who ventured out on the mudflats have been pulled out, some in dramatic rescues that illustrate just how treacherous and unforgiving the glacial silt can be. In the past three decades, at least three people have drowned after sinking into the ooze of Knik or Turnagain arms.
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Such predicaments occur so infrequently that no one knows exactly why they happen or how to rescue someone hopelessly stuck.

When Hancock and his team got to Fish Creek, she was warming herself by a fire. TX: This time, though, companions had pulled the woman out of her hip boots which were held fast by the mud before the rescuers arrived. "That was definitely the main thing that was on our minds." "We were saying, "Oh boy, not here, not now,' " recalled Bob Hancock, leader of the MatSu dive rescue team. She stood helplessly with one leg buried to the knee in glacial silt as the tide immersed her in 38degree water. A woman had been dipnetting at the mouth of Fish Creek and she was stuck in the mud.Īs the Matanuska-Susitna Borough divers hit the road in their rescue van, they were remembering the tragedy of 18-year-old Adeana Dickison, who died the way nobody should have to die. One week after a young woman drowned on the Turnagain Arm mud flats, Wasilla paramedics were awakened by an emergency call.
