Past holiday on state waters safer than usual
Around midnight last Saturday, a pair of Texas game wardens in a patrol boat on Lake Murvaul located what they had scrambled to the Panola County reservoir to find when their spotlight fell on two people clinging to a stump poking above the surface of the lake.
Earlier that evening, the two hugging the stump in the middle of the 3,800-acre lake had gone kayaking. They had capsized, finding themselves alone in the darkness, where they were lucky to find something onto which they could hold and even luckier to have the pair of game wardens, alerted to the missing boaters, find and rescue them.
It was just one of several such incidents to which Texas Parks and Wildlife Department game wardens responded over the three-day period from Saturday through Monday.
Start of summer fun
Welcome to Memorial Day holiday weekend 2017, the unofficial start of summer boating/fishing season that annually ranks at or near the top in the number of boaters on Texas public waters. That means it also is one of the busiest on-the-water weekends for about 500 Texas game wardens, the peace officers tasked with statewide responsibility for enforcing water safety laws and who are almost always the first responders to water-related emergencies.
Memorial Day weekend proved to be a fairly typical one for Texas boaters and game wardens. The three-day weekend saw its usual share of boating-related emergencies, accidents, violations of boating laws and a few just-plain-weird inci- dents. What it didn’t have, blessedly, was a boat-related fatal accident. This is soberingly rare. Sadly, extended holiday weekends during summer seldom pass without at least one fatal boating accident. Combine hundreds of thousands of Texans of varying degrees of experience and familiarity with boating laws flooding the state’s reservoirs, rivers and coastal waters with the giddiness of a holiday weekend, mix in the alcohol that some seem unable to leave on the bank and you have a recipe for disaster, if not tragedy.
But we are getting better.
Texas has seen its annual boating-related fatalities decline over the last two decades. The state averaged 54 recreational boating fatalities annually over the five-year period from 1997 to 2001. Over the last decade, that number has averaged about 30 — less than half of the 69 boating-related fatalities Texas suffered in 1997. Texas saw 34 boating-related fatalities in 2015 and 35 in 2016.
Why the steady decline?
Texas boating law enforcement officials such as Cody Jones, assistant commander and lead marine law enforcement officer in Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s law enforcement division, point to increased education of boaters, strong boating-while-intoxicated laws and a concerted effort by TPWD wardens to have a high-profile presence on the water, especially waters that see highest use or have seen a rash of incidents. And Texas wardens saturate the water on big weekends such as Memorial Day.
Still, holiday weekends can be dangerous and deadly. The 2014 Memorial Day weekend saw 21 boating accidents that resulted in four fatalities.
This Memorial Day weekend was much better in both regards. Along with recording no boating-related fatalities over the three-day weekend, TPWD wardens worked 13 boating accidents. That is a considerable decline from the 34 accidents (with one fatality) that Texas wardens saw during the 2016 Fourth of July weekend.
Life jackets a must
Over this Memorial Day weekend, Texas wardens issued 1,409 citations, with two of the three most common boating-related citations involving personal flotation devices — life jackets. Having an insufficient number of PFDs is the top boating citation — Texas law requires a PFD for each person on a vessel and requires them to be “readily accessible.”
The other common PFD-related citation issued to Texas boat operators is for a child younger than 13 not wearing a PFD. Texas law requires any child younger than 13 to wear a PFD when in a boat less than 26 feet long.
Texas game wardens don’t cut boaters any slack for violations of PFD rules. They see the results of ignoring them. Drowning is the cause of death in 80 percent of boating-related fatalities, and 83 percent of those victims were not wearing PFDs, according to data from the US. Coast Guard’s recently released 2016 Report on Recreational Boating.
That same report lists alcohol use as the leading known contributing factor in fatal boating accidents; where the primary cause of the accident was known, alcohol was listed as the leading factor in 15 percent of deaths.
Over the Memorial Day weekend, TPWD wardens filed 36 cases for boating while intoxicated, down from the 50 BWI arrests they made during the Fourth of July weekend a year ago.
One of those cases was tied to one of the 13 boating accidents wardens worked over the busy weekend. It involved an incident on an East Texas reservoir in which an individual suspected of being intoxicated fell out of the front of a pontoon boat and was struck in the legs by the boat’s propeller.
When the boat’s other occupants left the vessel to call for emergency assistance for the injured individual, the accident victim took off in the boat. When he finally returned, according to a TPWD law enforcement report on the incident, he was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment of his injures and while there consented to a blood/alcohol test.
After being released from the hospital, he was jailed for BWI.
In another incident, this one on a northeast Texas lake, a BWI suspect tried to escape wardens by jumping from a moving vessel. The suspect was apprehended by game wardens following in another boat.
Then there were the rescues like the one on Lake Murvaul.
Wardens in Southeast Texas were involved in the rescue of another pair of paddlers whose canoe capsized. Neither of the pair had a life jacket.
Wardens working the river-rich region near Austin responded to four search-and-rescue calls involving paddlers on those rivers. In one incident, a 26-year-old man tubing on the San Marcos River became separated from his group. Wardens searching the river by boat located the man alive the next day.
Paddlers increasing
On the coast, wardens were involved in a successful search-and-rescue involving a paddler who was on a stand-up paddle board, got too far from shore and did not have the strength to paddle to safety.
Those Memorial Day weekend events reflect the increasing numbers of incidents — search-andrescue, accidents, fatalities — involving paddle craft.
Over the last decade, Texas has seen an explosion in the number of kayaks, canoes and paddle boards on the state’s lakes, rivers and bays, with some even venturing into the near-shore Gulf. TPWD’s Jones said a conservative estimate places the number of paddle craft in Texas at 272,000; it is impossible to get a firm number since the state does not require paddle craft to be registered.
With that increase has come a concerning rise in accidents, injuries and fatalities involving paddle craft as well as an increase in search-and-rescues involving the paddle-powered boats. Last year, 31 percent of boating fatalities in Texas involved paddle craft; in 2015, it was 40 percent.
But there were no fatal incidents involving paddle craft or any other boats in Texas this Memorial Day weekend. And that’s something to memorialize.