Considering the Cold, Hard Facts

On a sunny afternoon in December, Karapet Aslanyan of Glendale found a kayak at the cabin he was renting on Big Bear Lake and decided to go for a paddle.

Aslanyan, 19, was less than 50 feet from the shore of Boulder Bay, where his friends watched from picnic tables, when he capsized into the 39-degree water. Rescue crews arrived within minutes, but Aslanyan, after struggling in vain to reach some rocks, had slipped beneath the surface.

Rescuers were helpless to save him because they weren’t trained in underwater rescue and had no wetsuits.

By the time the San Bernardino County sheriff’s cold-water dive team was helicoptered up the mountain nearly two hours later, it was too late.

Now some residents in Big Bear are asking why the 7.5-mile-long lake, which draws millions of visitors each year, doesn’t have its own cold-water rescue team. Not a single member of the sheriff’s special dive unit is based in the San Bernardino Mountains, even though Big Bear, Lake Arrowhead and some smaller lakes are popular winter tourist destinations.

“I would think it’s the most important thing we can have here,” said longtime Big Bear resident Jim Lyon, commander of the San Bernardino County sheriff’s volunteer mountain search-and-rescue team. “It makes perfectly good sense to equip and train the tons of young, strong firefighters we have up here, as opposed to waiting for someone to get here from down the hill.”

Many tourists are lured onto the lakes on sunny winter days, unaware that a plunge into the water can bring on deadly hypothermia when lake temperatures range from freezing to the 40s from November to March.

Some, like Aslanyan, also fail to wear a life preserver or wetsuit.

“In those temperatures, severe hypothermia can set in 30 minutes, and death in 45 minutes,” said Robert Douwens, a hypothermia researcher at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.

“Self-help is very limited in those temperatures. Motor-muscular controls vanish fast, there’s rigidity and numbing of the muscles, blood vessels constrict the blood flow to the extremities, the arms and legs. Heart attacks are possible.”

Four days after Aslanyan drowned, Lyon helped saved a vacationing San Diego couple and their 5-year-old son when their canoe capsized on Dec. 21. Lyon, 69, was kayaking on the lake near Mallard Lagoon, and wearing a wetsuit, when he spotted them in the water.

“They had capsized; there were paddles everywhere, and the mom couldn’t swim,” Lyon said. “I jumped into the water, got the mom out first. The dad had placed the boy on top of the turned-over canoe; I got them out.... I don’t think they would’ve made it if I wasn’t there.”

He said he was able to save them because he arrived just after the capsizing and while they were still on the surface.

Big Bear Lake is patrolled by the Big Bear Municipal Water District, and the surrounding mountain communities are served by city fire agencies in Big Bear Lake and Big Bear City, as well as a county fire unit in Fawnskin and sheriff’s unit in Big Bear Lake.

But the only emergency unit that performs underwater lake rescues is the sheriff’s dive team, and all 14 members live down the mountain, said Sgt. Jeff Morgan, the dive team supervisor.

Local fire officials said they didn’t expect to see a change, and lack the resources to establish their own dive teams.

“I’ve been here 25 years, and I think we’ve averaged one drowning a year,” Big Bear Lake Fire Chief John Morley said. “There may be [people] who want this, but there are also people who want more for less and would not be willing to pay for it. I’ve told our city manager there is willingness on my staff to do it, but there are no resources to pay for it.”

Big Bear City Fire Chief Dana Van Leuven said his agency faced the same funding constraints, and San Bernardino County Fire Department spokeswoman Tracey Martinez said the agency had not found a need to establish a mountain cold-water rescue team.

Access to Lake Arrowhead is restricted to the private lake’s 4,500 members, and there is only very light use during the winter, said John Rutledge, the Arrowhead Lake Assn.’s general manager.

The priority is to patrol the lake heavily during the summer, when as many as 2,000 boats a day are on the lake, he said.

“We have a obligation to protect the users of this resource, but it’s about priorities,” Rutledge said. “There is a certain amount of personal risk in any type of recreation, whether it be hiking in the mountains, climbing a trail in Griffith Park or paddling on the lake. We don’t live in a perfectly safe, bubble environment.”

It’s a different story at some popular cold-water lakes in Northern California.

The Mono County sheriff’s volunteer dive team members can respond to calls at either Mammoth Lakes or Crowley Lake within five minutes, said Sgt. Tim Minder, search-and-rescue coordinator.

At Lake Tahoe, El Dorado County sheriff’s deputies stationed near the lake are trained to perform dive team duties, including cold-water dives. But because the lake is so big, and 1,600 feet deep in spots, people “tend to disappear,” sheriff’s Lt. Marc Adams said.

The danger posed by cold-water lakes in Southern California can be more deceptive, because tourists see sunny skies and are lulled into a false sense of security. Big Bear draws 12.5 million visitors annually, and most winter tourists are Southern Californians, according to the chamber of commerce.

“Officials up here need to consider that those who come up here on a nice day, having grown up in the nice weather of Southern California, probably don’t realize how deadly the lake water is,” said lake resident Tammy Minn. Big Bear Lake City Manager Michael Perry said the Aslanyan drowning and the San Diego family’s near-drowning had prompted city leaders to discuss the issue.

“We will look at it, and if it becomes a frequent event, we will look at if we should assemble a local dive team,” he said.

Perry said one possible response to the drowning was to launch a public information campaign educating visitors about the danger of hypothermia.

Kathy Weil, a veteran kayaker who manages several rental properties near the lake, said she and other vacation home managers hoped the city would consider regulations requiring property owners to lock up their lake “water toys” during cold months.

Big Bear Lake, as wide as 1.5 miles in spots, is owned and managed by the state-funded, privately operated Big Bear Municipal Water District. The district keeps one patrol boat near the sometimes-frozen lake between November and May, said lake manager Mike Stephenson.

People can be fined up to $500 for walking on the lake when it’s frozen, but the only restriction to paddling or boating is that everyone must have a life jacket.

Big Bear Lake manager Mike Stephenson said he planned to discuss Aslanyan’s death and the call for a local dive team at Tuesday’s meeting of Mountain Mutual Aid, an emergency services inter-agency collaborative that addresses mountain safety issues.

“We lost a person’s life,” he said. “Even though we think we did a pretty good job trying to save him, if we had him out of the water an hour sooner, he probably had a real good chance to make it.”