One caregiver’s day of relaxation by the water quickly turned into a rescue effort when wind gusts pushed beachgoers into open water away from the shore.
Anna Hansen-Bennett
Anna Hansen-Bennett had landed her personal watercraft on the beach of Anderson Cove at Pineview Reservoir near Ogden, Utah, when a wind gust blew a family member’s shoe into the water. A five-year-old boy in their group began chasing it.
From her experience as a critical care tech at Alta View Hospital and a nursing student, Anna thought a dangerous situation might occur if he ended up in the water.
Still in her life jacket she pursued the shoe for him as it blew further away and around a bend. There she saw and heard a group screaming.
“Some were in the water, some on the sand. Most were fully dressed in heavy clothing,” Anna says. “One woman was screaming, ‘There’s a man and a child in the water. The man can’t swim. You need to go save him, please.’”
Anna sprinted through the water and swam toward the child and man.
“I grabbed the child who was in a life vest and this man who was in denim,” she says.
Anna began swimming to the shore with the child under one arm and the man under the other.
“He was just so exhausted he couldn’t swim anymore,” she says. “He was throwing up the water he had swallowed and kept grabbing my life vest.”
She felt as if she was being pulled down into the water herself so she floated in the water with them until someone else could help. Her husband, who had come looking for her, swam out to meet them, grabbed the man, and swam with him to shore.
Anna held onto the boy, but he was emotional from the screams coming from the shore and panicked, saying, “We’re gonna die.”
“I turned him towards me and introduced myself,” Anna says. “I felt like he wouldn’t cooperate with me if he wasn’t calm first; that’s something I learned in school.”
Anna reassured him in a comforting way by pointing out the progress they were making toward the beach, which calmed him until they arrived on the shore.
About this time she heard another woman scream, “There’s another child missing. He’s on a paddleboard, and I can’t see him.”
Anna looked out over the water, but she could only see a boat in the distance. She knew she didn’t have the energy to swim, so she ran over sharp rocks to her personal watercraft, picked up her husband, and found the child in the water some distance away. They brought him onboard and surveyed the water again.
“I was looking around, and the water was pretty murky,” Anna says. “At the time I thought, I don't actually know how many people are missing right now.”
She scanned the water and saw a man chin level with the water. “He was right in the middle of all these big waves; I almost missed him,” Anna says. “He was wearing a life vest and was fully clothed. I think he’d tried to corral the family and then got stuck in the middle of the lake.”
They all piled on the personal watercraft and headed toward shore, but it kept capsizing from their weight. After the third time they waited for a rescue boat and then loaded the man and child into it.
When Anna and her husband reached the shore, a woman fainted near her.
“As a nursing student we learned about doing a focus assessment—asking ourselves what do you observe or what would the priorities be? Airway, breathing, and circulation would be the priority.”
Anna made an assessment, saw that she was okay, and allowed someone else to help her.
Later they started for home with Anna’s brother. He’d not eaten because he’d been distracted from the events and had a diabetic episode in the back of the car.
Anna made an urgent run into a convenience store for a sugary drink. Throwing her wallet toward the cashier, she ran back to the car and rubbed sugar on the inside of his cheek until he woke up.
Many at work have called Anna a hero. She says she’s simply grateful she was “in the right place at the right time and had the physical means to be able to go out there and grab them.”
She’s especially grateful she was wearing a life vest and learned skills in school and work she could use to help others.
“Anna is always learning from our nurses and building upon concepts she’s learning in nursing school,” says nurse manager Lisa Stevens. “As she works in a critical care setting, she’s always assessing her patients for comfort and triaging their needs under nursing guidance.”
Anna used nonverbal communication methods she’d learned at work to help in the rescue, especially with the children.
“I’ve learned at work how to be there in a professional and appropriate manner to a child when things are scary,” Anna says. “His family messaged me afterwards and said he just kept saying, ‘I’m so glad for that girl on the jet ski who picked me up.’”
“Anna’s learned how to navigate and adapt to stressful situations and amazingly applied this to those who needed her urgent help,” Lisa says. “She’s one who consistently looks for opportunities to help others, whether it’s patients or other caregivers on our team.”