On vacation, Elkins’ state senator rescues drowning swimmer
Posted on Friday, July 6, 2007
State Sen. Bill Pritchard made headlines while on vacation in Florida this week when he helped rescue a man drowning in a swimming pool.
The Elkins Republican, staying in his family’s condominium at Perdido Key in Pensacola, was heading out after a leisurely lunch on July 4 when he heard a woman crying for someone to help her husband. Pritchard said he jumped in the pool, “Black-Berry and all,” and pulled out the seemingly lifeless man, who had turned purple and had no pulse.
Glenn Austin, public information officer for the Escambia County sheriff’s office, said deputies credited Pritchard and a doctor on the scene with saving the man’s life.
“Without those two, this man would not have survived,” Austin said Thursday.
The sheriff’s office wouldn’t release the identity of the man Pritchard helped rescue. Pritchard said the man’s wife said he was improving Thursday morning in the intensive care unit at Baptist Hospital in Pensacola, where he was taken by helicopter around 2 p. m. Wednesday.
Pritchard said that during lunch on his condo’s balcony he had seen the couple enter the swimming pool together. The woman left for a few minutes to go to the bathroom and came back to find her husband floating facedown in the water. That’s when she started yelling.
“It just shows you how quickly that can happen,” Pritchard said. “He’d slipped in the pool. He panicked and sucked in a bunch of water.”
He said the man is the same age as he, 64.
Pritchard said he tried to clear the man’s lungs of water by turning him upside down, using first-aid techniques he learned more than 50 years ago as a Boy Scout.
The condo superintendent ran up and helped. A doctor, identified on the sheriff ’s office report as Barbara Brierre of Lafayette, La., took over cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
Pritchard said a local television station in Pensacola asked him if he felt like a hero.
“I feel like a guy that saw somebody in the swimming pool and jumped in and tried to help,” he said. “I hope somebody would do the same for me.”
As for his BlackBerry cellphone, “miraculously, it’s working,” though it’s acting a little funny, he said.
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