Tragic Drowning at Strawberry Island
A civil engineer loses his life in the Columbia River despite the desperate, repeated rescue attempts of his colleague.
Frank Sedusky, a civil engineer in the employ of Culp, Riley & Livesley, was accidentally drowned Friday afternoon while working at their model pumping plant at Strawberry Island. He fell from a raft moored in the current to test the velocity of the water. Mr. Livesley, who was on the raft, saw that Sedusky could not swim and plunged into the stream to intercept him. Despite multiple attempts to pull his colleague from the rapids—even succeeding in touching the drowning man's body once—the current proved too strong. The body was recovered two days later in the Columbia River, two miles below the mouth of the Snake River.
“A third trial was most nearly successful as the rescuer actually succeeded in touching the body as it sank for the last time, but strength was too far gone.”
This tragedy highlights the extreme dangers inherent in the early 20th-century push to engineer the Columbia River for irrigation and agriculture, a project that fundamentally altered the geography of the Tri-Cities.
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