An 8-year-old girl died and a 4-year-old boy went missing Sunday when they were swept away by a current on a river in California’s Central Valley, officials said. The children were not wearing life jackets.
The Fresno County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release that the children were with their mother and her friend as they tried to make their way to a certain rock on the Kings River a mile below Pine Flat Dam, 30 miles northeast of Fresno.
“The information we have right now is that they were all wading in the water, and they were trying to get out to a rock that they wanted to climb onto, and at some point, the children were swept away by a current,” Tony Botti, the public information officer for the sheriff’s office told SFGATE. “I’m not sure if they ever made it to the rock or if they were swept away as they were wading to the rock.”
Botti said the group had pulled over at one of the many river access areas along Trimmer Springs Road, which runs parallel to the Kings River.
The river temperatures have been at 52 to 53 degrees in recent days, and it’s flowing at 12,900 cubic feet per second. “This is really fast,” Botti said. “We consider anything over 5,000 cubic feet per second to be dangerous.”
The river is currently closed to recreation due to dangerous conditions created by this year’s unusually large snowpack in the Sierra Nevada.
An emergency call was made just before 2 p.m., and Cal Fire firefighters responded with rescue boats while the sheriff’s office flew a helicopter overhead.
Less than an hour later, first responders found the girl and determined that she had died, the sheriff’s office said. The boy was not found, and while the search was stopped overnight, it will resume Monday.
The Kings River and the nearby San Joaquin River, which are popular spots for outdoor recreation on warm days, have been closed since March 14.
Fresno County Sheriff John Zanoni ordered the closure “in response to heavy winter storms and melting snow that have created high water levels and hazardous conditions,” according to the sheriff’s office. Water temperatures are chilly and in the 50s.
The sheriff’s office said that conditions on the rivers are expected to only worsen in coming weeks as temperatures rise and snow in the Sierra melts more rapidly and pours into the state’s waterways. After an unusually wet winter, the Sierra Nevada snowpack is massive — it was 325% of average as of May 19.
