Austin-Travis County EMS wrote on Twitter at about 2:30 p.m. that crews were responding to a dam in the Colorado River near Lady Bird Lake after multiple people called 911 reporting a boat “up against the dam” that “looks like it’s going to go over the dam.”
When EMS crews arrived, they shared a photo of a small blue motor boat hanging over the dam with four people inside.
Crews lowered life vests down to the passengers and then attached the boat to a police boat with a rope to pull in back into open water, Austin-Travis County EMS said. None of the occupants needed medical attention.
Boaters taking an afternoon jaunt on Austin’s Lady Bird Lake got dangerously close to plunging off the 36-foot-high Longhorn Dam on Thursday before rescuers arrived.
The boat’s four female passengers had rented a boat earlier that afternoon from Retro Boat Rentals, a company that specializes in renting out fiberglass runabout boats from the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The boat drifted too close to the dam and did not have enough power in its electric motor to pull away, Brad Smith, an Austin police Lake Patrol officer, told ABC News. The passengers called the boat company for assistance, but Retro Boat Rentals staff members also got stuck on the dam trying to help them.
The boaters were not wearing life vests.
