Rescue on the Cumberland

On Thursday, March 30, EverStart Batteries Series pro anglers Ricky Shumpert and Alan Walls set out on Lake Cumberland for a normal day of tournament pre-fishing. They didn’t expect to find a boy near death. They didn’t expect to save his life.

It was Thursday, less than a week before competition began in the final EverStart Eastern Division tournament on Lake Cumberland, a reservoir along the Cumberland River outside of Somerset, Ky. Ricky Shumpert called his fishing buddy, fellow EverStart Batteries Series pro Alan Walls, for a half day of pre-fishing to scout fish locations. They drove Shumpert’s Ranger boat about four miles upstream from the boat ramp at Burnside Island State Park toward the point where the Cumberland South Fork meets the main Cumberland channel. Having stopped to fish a bank among the towering, scenic cliffs of South Fork, they noticed a person sitting half-submerged at the water’s edge. It looked to be a teenage boy, and he didn’t look right just sitting there at the base of the cliff.

“I said, `Ricky, there ain’t no stairs leading down there,'” explained Walls.

Shumpert said, “We were within a hundred yards of him and we heard him say, `Excuse me, can you help me?'”

When they approached the boy, they noticed he was naked and all cut up. “He said, `I’m cold. Can you get me out of the water?'” Shumpert described. “When I looked down in the water, I saw that his left leg was turned around backwards.”

Falling from the sky

The boy told them his name was Harold C. Chandler, he was 17 years old and he had run away from a youth home. Most remarkable was what Chandler said next: The reason he was sitting naked, broken and alone at the bottom of a 110-foot cliff was that he fell from the top.

“He was coherent enough to tell us his name and how old he was,” explained Shumpert. “Then he said, `I’ve been out here for seven days. I’m cold. Can you get me out of the water?'”

The anglers responded immediately. Chandler was sitting on a ledge at the water’s edge, submerged to his chest. Recognizing that the boy was probably suffering from shock and hypothermia, Shumpert and Walls knew they had to try and remove him from the icy water as soon as possible. But they didn’t dare move his badly broken body for fear of injuring him further. By the appearance of his discolored limbs, they could tell that both of Chandler’s arms were shattered and, judging by the angle of his left leg, that he was likely suffering from a broken hip. There was also a pool of blood behind a nearby rock on the bank. Even though they usually do, neither angler had remembered to bring his cellular phone with him. So Walls gave Chandler an extra jacket and took the boat to a nearby home to call for help.

Shumpert stayed with the boy, gave him some water and crackers, and listened as he described how he arrived at the bottom of the cliff. Late on March 25, the Saturday night before, Chandler ran away from the Kentucky Baptist Home for Children. He was running around the back side of a house when he stumbled over the edge of the South Fork cliff in the dark. The young man fell over 110 feet straight down onto the flat, solid rock and scrubby brush at the bottom. The only reason he lived to tell about it was, about 60 feet up from the bottom, Chandler hit a slanted rock outcropping, breaking his fall.

“If he would have hit on a flat surface there, it would have killed him,” said Shumpert.

For five days he lay in the brush, injured and exposed in a remote area – not seven days as he initially indicated to his rescuers. Pulaski County officials had performed a cursory land search for Chandler when he was reported missing, but systematic search missions by land, air and water are not the normal procedure for 17-year-old runaways. Also, Chandler had run away from youth homes at least three times before.

On Sunday, the day after he fell, some local anglers in a passing boat actually saw him. Chandler raised his head, but, inexplicably, he did not call out to them. The locals – with whom, coincidentally, Shumpert is acquainted – mistook the person on the rocks for a casual sunbather and kept moving.

By Thursday, Chandler was suffering from severe dehydration and sun poisoning. He had painstakingly removed his clothes in an effort to cool off. His thirst apparently overwhelmed the pain of his injuries, so with his remaining strength he crawled 50 feet on his elbows to the water’s edge to drink and find refuge from the sun. He had been submersed in the 59-degree lake for 15 minutes when he saw the approach of Shumpert’s Ranger.

“I think he had gotten past the pain stage, or the water had made him numb,” explained Walls. “He said, `Man, I was burning up.’ But he was losing body heat rapidly. I’m just glad we found him when we did. He wouldn’t have lasted much longer in that water.”

Walls took the boat 10 minutes back to the ramp at Burnside and returned with Pulaski County rescue personnel. Then he turned around to escort even more emergency medical technicians, firefighters and rescue gear from Burnside to the boy. Walls and Shumpert made five trips up and down the lake carrying people and equipment during the rescue effort.

“That was a great help for us,” explained Tiger Robinson, Pulaski County director of public safety. “Had they not been there, we would have had to rent a boat.”

Chandler had been in the cold water for an estimated one hour and 15 minutes before EMTs were able to load him on a backboard and place him on the deck of Shumpert’s Ranger. There, amid the rocky bank of the Cumberland River on the deck of a bass boat, they administered emergency treatment to the near-lifeless teenager.

“I thought we were going to sink Ricky’s boat with all that equipment,” Walls said.

Though he was injured badly, Chandler remained apologetic throughout the ordeal. “He was surprisingly coherent, and that really shocked us,” said Walls. “He kept saying, `I really hate to mess up your guys’ fishing.'”

With the boat weighed down by Chandler, rescue crew and gear, the anglers drove back to the boat ramp. En route, the boy’s vital signs, alarmingly, began to falter, and a Med-Evac helicopter was called to meet them onshore. They arrived at the boat ramp and loaded him into the helicopter a mile up the road from Burnside. From there he was airlifted in critical condition to the University of Kentucky Hospital in Lexington.

Beyond the call of duty

Two days later, Shumpert called the hospital to see how Chandler was doing. Officially, he had broken both arms, broke his left leg in six places, broke all of his ribs, punctured a lung and shattered his pelvis. He also suffered severe hypothermia and sunstroke. He was still in rough shape – doctors estimated it may be a year until he can walk again – but he was improving. The important thing was that Chandler was alive.

At registration for the EverStart tournament the following Tuesday, Shumpert, who hails from Lexington, S.C., and Walls, of Boca Raton, Fla., were each presented with the Pulaski County “Good Ole Boy” award by County Judge-Executive Darrell BeShears. The award, which is normally reserved for local residents who exhibit exemplary acts of citizenship, proved to be an honor of the highest degree.

“The award means they performed beyond the call of duty,” said Robinson. “It’s not real often that it’s handed to complete strangers.”

The two professional bass anglers – regular guys who came to Lake Cumberland prepared for the pressure of a bass tournament, but found themselves thrust into a boy’s intense struggle for survival – prevailed on all counts during their 10-day stay in eastern Kentucky. Walls placed 20th out of 175 pro anglers and won $1,400 in the EverStart Batteries Series Eastern Division tournament. Shumpert was just 4 ounces of fish short of the Pro Division lead and sat in second place going into the final day. He eventually finished in seventh place and took home $5,000.

But it was their fortunate discovery of the boy in the lake that made it one tournament neither angler will soon forget. For Walls, the incident proved the importance of outdoor safety awareness. “It just goes to show that when you go out there in these situations, you’ve got to be aware of your surroundings,” he said. “I just hope that if I was in the same situation as he was, somebody would find me.”

Shumpert, understandably, was just thankful that fate was on their side, “We were just lucky enough to stop in the right place and get him the help he needed.”

And so was a teenage runaway named Harold C. Chandler.