Ordeal by Water : As Husband Watches, Stranded Wife Is Rescued From Islet

Scott McDermott watched from the Main Street bridge in Ventura as his wife and two neighbors waited for help beneath him on an islet in the middle of the raging Ventura River.

Just hours earlier, the islet had been part of the Ventura Beach RV Resort.

As McDermott tried to flag down helicopters circling above, he saw the swift current lift trailers one by one and dump them into the ocean.

“There goes another one,” he said time and again. “Mine could be next.”

Marilyn McDermott, 38, held her cats Chubby and Froddo in her arms and looked into the rainy sky.

“Hold on, honey!” her husband shouted. “The copters are coming to get you!”

For the McDermotts and about 100 other residents at the recreational vehicle park on the northern shore of the Ventura River mouth, the floodwater struck hard, blanketing cars, trailers and pets in a matter of minutes.

Some managed to wade or swim to safety.

At least a dozen were rescued by helicopters and rubber boats.

The McDermotts’ ordeal started at 9 a.m. shortly after Scott McDermott left the trailer to pick up a pack of Marlboros at a nearby supermarket.

It was raining, but the water was 30 feet from the park.

“I just thought it was another storm and it would pass,” he said.

Marilyn McDermott, 38, awoke to the sound of an empty butane tank clanking against the trailer.

Minutes later, her husband returned to find waist-deep water outside their home.

He tied his German shepherds, Honey and Zeus, to a leash and helped them swim to safety, assuming that his wife would follow, he said. But Marilyn McDermott stayed behind, trying to save the cats.

By the time she got the cats out of the trailer, all she could do was head for the islet, where she joined neighbors Natalie Tierney and Lonnie Bustillos.

At 10:55 a.m., the sheriff’s helicopter landed on the 10-foot by 20-foot islet to rescue them.

McDermott watched in silence from the bridge, his hands shaking as he puffed on a cigarette.

The McDermotts’ tan trailer, tilted by the raging water, clung precariously to the ground by a cable television hookup.

“There goes everything I own,” said Scott McDermott, 31, an Oxnard roofer who had been living in the park for six months.

Clyde, the couple’s parakeet, and Smokey, the pet rat, were still inside the trailer.

McDermott’s tools were there too.

After the rescue, Scott McDermott knew that his wife was safe but could not find her at nearby emergency shelters.

Frantically, he raced around town in his rain-soaked car with his dogs in the back seat.

A ham radio operator finally told McDermott that sheriff’s deputies had spotted her near a supermarket on Ventura Avenue.

An hour later, McDermott found his wife sitting under an Ojai Freeway bridge, holding onto the cats and a plastic garbage bag.

“Where have you been? I’ve been looking all over,” he asked, kissing her on the forehead.

“Hold on to this,” she told him, handing over the half-full bag. “This is everything we’ve got left.”

She said she hoped that more of their things could be recovered later.

“The bed was floating inside the trailer, so I tried to put the most important stuff on top of the bed,” Marilyn McDermott said.

The past 12 months have been tough for the McDermotts.

Scott was laid off from a job in July, when the roofing business went bust.

Unable to make mortgage payments on Marilyn’s $5.50-an-hour office job, the couple lost their Ventura house and lived in a tent in Ojai for a few weeks.

In September, they borrowed $600 from Scott’s father and bought the trailer.

Two months later, Scott landed a job with an Oxnard roofing company and things were starting to look up.

He bought his wife a bright blue sweater for Christmas--one of the things she carried out in the garbage bag.

“My most valued possession,” she said Wednesday as the couple ate hamburgers in the rain.

Marilyn McDermott was still shaken from the rescue and nursing wounds.

“See,” she told her husband as she showed him claw marks and cat bites on her arm and neck. “Chubby almost had a heart attack in the helicopter,” she said.

After lunch they headed with their pets to the Red Cross shelter at De Anza Middle School.

There was no news on their trailer, but not everything had been lost.

A $500 paycheck, his biggest in months, awaited Scott at the bank.

“We’ll just have to start over,” he said.