A 19-year-old male was rescued this morning from the base of a dam on Cornell University’s campus, reports syracuse.com (http://tinyurl.com/zffhsbd)
Firefighters rushed to the Beebe Lake Dam on Cornell’s campus just before 8 a.m. after the teenager was spotted in the icy water at the bottom of the dam, according to the Ithaca Fire Department. Temperatures were hovering near 10 degrees.
Using ropes and ladders, rescuers descended to the base of the dam. The teenager was pulled to safety in less than 30 minutes, firefighters said. He was suffering from hypothermia and other serious injuries.
The teenager was rushed by Bangs Ambulance to Jessup Fields not far from the dam. From Jessup Fields, a Guthrie Air helicopter airlifted him to the Guthrie Robert Packer Hospital in Sayre, Pennsylvania.
Cornell University Police are investigating how the teen ended up in the water, firefighters said. Firefighters did not release the teen’s identity.
The man appears to have been found under a walkway that crosses over Fall Creek near the end of Beebe Lake.
That is just upstream from a bridge that was the center of a lawsuit brought by the parents of a Cornell student who killed himself by jumping off a bridge over Fall Creek in 2010. The lawsuit was settled in 2014 with the establishment of a scholarship named after the student.
