Emergency crews rescued a west St. Louis County man after he became trapped on the rock bluffs lining the Big River at Rockford Park in House Springs on June 15, High Ridge Fire Chief John Barton said.
He said the High Ridge Fire Protection District received a 911 call reporting that two men were trapped on the bluffs opposite the boat ramp at the park at 4:30 p.m. By the time rescue crews arrived, one of the men managed to swim to shore.
The men, one from Wildwood and the other from Creve Coeur, received minor cuts and scrapes and refused medical treatment, Barton said.
“They said they knew how to swim,” he said. “It’s the same story we have every time – they underestimated the current. The water is up right now. It’s more ominous looking than it usually is when the river is at normal levels. They wound up trapped on the other side, up against the wall.”
Barton said this is High Ridge Fire’s first water rescue of the year at Rockford Park. Last summer, the fire district responded to 10 emergency calls for water rescues on the Big River and one person drowned. In 2023, two people drowned.
Rockford Park has been the site of drownings for at least a decade, with six drownings occurring since 2014, because people tend to misjudge the strength of the Big River at the park’s access point, officials said.
Crowd control can also become an issue at the park, Barton said, because people park along the narrow entrance road and on the boat ramp, preventing emergency services from reaching the river.
“It wasn’t overcrowded (on Sunday),” Barton said. “But people were trying to watch the incident unfold, and they were standing on the boat ramps and gathering in the parking lot. We did need a bit of crowd control to keep them away from our equipment and give us space to set everything up.”
High Ridge Fire crews, along with crews from the Eureka and Cedar Hill fire protection districts, launched two boats to rescue the man from the rock bluffs. The rescue took about 30 minutes, Barton said, and was slightly hampered by an onlooker who was standing above the victim higher up on the bluffs.
“This time, we also had an individual interfering with the rescue,” Barton said. “He was standing on the bluff above where the victim was, and he was yelling at the victim to just jump in our boat, which is incredibly dangerous.
“There is a lot of stuff working against us – the natural conditions of the river, crowd sizes and then in this scenario, someone who decided they were going to involve themselves in it and was instructing the victim to do something that was very unsafe for everybody on the boat. Just jumping from the rocks is not safe for anybody.”
Barton said a water rescue requires all hands on deck. All High Ridge Fire stations were at the scene, forcing crews from the Fenton Fire Protection District to be ready for any emergency calls that come through elsewhere in the High Ridge Fire District.
It takes about a dozen pieces of equipment and two dozen firefighters to rescue someone from the river, Barton said.
“The water is dangerous and it overpowers swimmers all the time,” he said. “It’s not only putting their lives at risk, but it’s also putting the lives of rescuers at risk who have to go out during elevated river levels. It’s very resource-intensive, putting people and boats in the water to try and get somebody back across the river.”