Hidden hazards lurk below river’s surface

City dwellers who come to the Tri-state region on summer weekends don’t realize how deadly the area’s waterfalls can be. 

The most recent death was on July 30, when 21-year-old Aiden Campion-Pratt drowned at Bash Bish Falls State Park in nearby Massachusetts. Rescue workers were unable to get in and retrieve his body for several days because of the hazards the water and rocks presented.  

There were two drownings in Kent in 2012, near the waterfall at Bull’s Bridge. Both victims were under 25 years of age and both were from New York state. 

In 2009, a local boy who had grown up swimming in the Housatonic and was very familiar with its currents and hazards died in June while swimming and diving off a cliff with two friends. 

Skip Kosciusko of Cornwall was one of the volunteers who helped to save one of those two friends. The boy was hanging onto a rock outcropping with one hand as the fast-flowing waters tried to pull him in.

“I had no idea how much power there was in that water until I got down there and got slammed about 10 feet into a rock wall,” Kosciusko recalled. 

He was in full rescue gear (he is a member of the Swiftwater Rescue Team and the Northwest Rope Rescue Team) and was roped to three trees at the top of the cliff. The water sucked his pants and some of his gear off his body. 

The water is much higher in the Housatonic this August than it has been in at least the past two years, Kosciusko said. That makes it more attractive to urban dwellers seeking relief from the heat. But it also increases the hazards — many of which are not apparent. 

“Water can look benign on the surface but still be extremely dangerous,” said William Tingley of Sharon, an experienced whitewater paddler and a member of the Housatonic River Commission since the early 1980s (the commission was formed in 1979).

“People think of water as soft,” he said. “They feel that they can dive into it or even fall into it and not get hurt.

“And moving water makes people giddy. I know it has that effect on me.”

The rocky road to danger

Often there are large, sharp rocks just below the surface of that “soft” water. Anyone who’s being carried downstream by a strong current is in danger of hitting one of those rocks, hard and at high speed.

Even the rocks that are visible can be very dangerous. The ones closest to the surface are often covered with moss and extremely slick.  It’s easy to slip and get hurt in the fall; it’s easy to get swept up by the current after you fall; and it’s also possible to slip and get a hand or foot caught in one of the “cuts” that the water has created in the rocks. 

Like a washing machine

Kosciusko pointed out an additional hazard caused by rocks: They create mini waterfalls and at the bottom of those falls are rotors, where the water churns powerfully in a circle that starts at the top and rolls back and down. 

When water cascades down with a lot of force, it pushes the water below it down, so that the water level is lower at the bottom of a large or small waterfall than it is in the rest of the river. 

The water then rushes backward to fill that hole, creating what is known as a rotor. You might expect that the water at a bottom of a waterfall would push you downstream at high speed. The opposite will happen: It will pull you back toward the waterfall and can pull you into the rotor created by the constant process of water being pushed down and displaced and then replaced. 

“It’s like a washing machine,” Tingley said. “The hydraulics of it can hold a person in place and not let their body pop back up.”

 On the Housatonic River at the Great Falls in Falls Village and Salisbury, the large waterfall is obviously dangerous. But the smaller ripples below it can also be hazardous. 

They seem tempting; and many people do go in the water and emerge without problems. 

“But there are always risks,” Tingley warned. 

Especially for children, who should not be left unattended in the river.

Everyone who goes in the river should be wearing a life preserver, both Tingley and Kosciusko stressed.

“I can understand why people might be averse to the old orange horse-collar preservers,” Tingley said. “But they make some really cool ones now.”

The dangers of foamy water

Even a full-body life preserver won’t protect someone who’s caught in the frothy white water near the falls, Kosciusko warned.

“What makes the water foamy are air bubbles,” he said. “Those bubbles make the water much less buoyant. On top of that, you have the rotor and you have strong currents you might not be able to negotiate.”

Younger people through the decades have enjoyed diving off the cliffs into the foamy water below. If you must dive off the cliffs, Kosciusko warned, don’t swim back toward the cliff, because that’s where the pull toward the waterfall and its powerful rotor is strongest. 

“Swim toward the dark water in the center and let the current carry you downstream,” he said.

“If the current’s got some power to it, you’re looking at not getting to the shore for possibly hundreds of yards from where you started,” Tingley added. “You’re not going to the shore that’s perpendicular to your body. You’re getting washed downstream. You want to angle your body toward the shore that seems most friendly.”

Inexperienced river swimmers might think that they can grab onto tree limbs and trunks in the water. 

“We call those trees ‘strainers,’” Tingley said. “You want at all costs to get around or go below them so you don’t get pinned to them by the force of the water. It’s an amazing amount of power and it can hold your arms and legs, no matter how strong a swimmer you think you are.”

Shallow water, fast currents

Shallow water might also look to the untrained eye to be safer than the fast-moving deeper water. 

“The current is often stronger in the shallower water,” Kosciusko said. “And it can very easily sweep you off your feet and take you downstream.”

“You’re looking at these things in the river that are complex and different from what you think they are,” Tingley said. “Even if it doesn’t look like there’s a rapid, with white water and froth … even that water that’s just flowing, it’s got speed.”

The Rattlesnake

The waterfalls at Bull’s Bridge in Kent were an especially popular destination for out of town visitors until this year, but increased police patrols and new gates at some of the river’s access points down there have sent people north to the Great Falls this summer. 

Tingley noted that the area beneath the Great Falls is known by boaters as The Rattlesnake. In spring, when the water is at its highest and fastest, it is listed as a Class 5 whitewater.  American Whitewater defines Class 5 as “Extremely long, obstructed, or very violent rapids.”

Another hazard is indicated by the name of those rapids. Tingley said that the area got its name back in the 1970s. In summer when the water was very low, he said, “snakes would appear and bake in the sun on the rocks.” The Northwest Corner has a large population of many kinds of snakes, including rattlesnakes. 

All these hazards are ones that nature supplies. The biggest risk factor of all, Kosciusko said, is one that human visitors bring along with them: “Drugs and alcohol.”