Firefighters, Police Credited With Rescue From Icy Margate Waters

From the Atlantic City Press published: Friday, February 8, 2008

Several Margate firefighters and police officers are credited with saving the life of a woman who ended up in the bay off Amherst Avenue early Sunday morning.

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The incident started on the docks across the street from Sofia Restaurant at 4:05 a.m., and the rescue - in 37 degree water - was complicated by overnight icing on the piers the emergency workers had to use, Margate Fire Chief John Kelley said. He gave this account of the incident:

After the city's dispatch center got a call about someone in the water, Patrolman Steve Swift climbed over the locked, 7-foot-high gate of the Sunset Marina and let police Sgt. Earl Kenney in. The officers found a woman in the water and a man on an inner tube trying to hold onto her. By lying down on the slick pier, the two officers were able to reach into the bay and and grab and hold the woman, but they couldn't lift her out of the water.

Meanwhile, Margate firefighters Michael Palmer and Joseph DeStefano put on ice-rescue suits in the back of an ambulance on the short drive from the city's firehouse to the rescue scene. Palmer and DeStefano, both trained ocean lifeguards, rushed into the water and got a rescue harness around the woman, and the two police officers and several other firefighters hauled the woman out of the water and onto the dock with a rope attached to the harness.


Police officers from Longport also arrived and helped the man on the inner tube out of the water, and a Ventnor Fire Department ambulance crew took the woman to AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center, City Campus.
The fire chief said he couldn't identify the woman and had no information on her condition except that she was "conscious and oriented" when she was rescued. He said it's unclear if the man on the tube had been with her or was a witness who tried to help.

Without the quick emergency response, the bay current "would have quickly carried the victim out of sight," the fire chief says. And in 37-degree water, she would have started losing normal motor skills within two minutes, he added. The fire department's 2nd Platoon, which is led by Capt. Tom Shields and was involved in the rescue, had just finished its annual ice/cold-water rescue training at Margate's Jewish Community Center the week before the incident, Kelley said