Seventy-five yards wide at its mouth, the chute slices 200 yards inland, narrowing to just three or four feet before ending at the base of Cape Perpetua towering 800 feet above.
The churn’s wild waves draw thousands of people a year to the Forest Service day-use area. Visitors can view the action from platforms above or walk down a long, paved path to a series of steps leading to the basalt and the water’s edge.
Steve Allen, 67, of Walnut Creek, Calif. was visiting there Sept. 9 with his wife, Linda. It was their third attempt in the last five years to see the sights of Oregon.
They walked the path to the bottom. Steve Allen told Linda he was going ahead to check things out, picking his way east around a corner on the south edge of the chute. He got to within 30 feet of the end.
Eyewitnesses say Allen was at the edge of the churn when he turned to see if his wife was following. It was then that he lost his footing. Unable to regain his balance, they told YachatsNews, Allen made a split-second decision to leap 3- to 4-feet across the chasm. He landed on the rocks, but slipped off and tumbled 25-30 feet into the water.
Although there are dozens of river, lake and ocean drownings a year in Oregon, it was the first on Cape Perpetua since 2016 when a man was swept into nearby Thor’s Well and disappeared.
For the next 20 minutes eight bystanders tried to keep Allen afloat until first responders could arrive. They formed a line, holding the person in front of them at the edge of the chute.
A man from Montana perched on a lower ledge and dangled a makeshift line of dog leashes, belts and clothing to Allen as he floated below, pounded by the waves.
Santos Tovar of Bakersfield, Calif. was second in line, holding onto the rope. Tovar’s two sons were behind, holding him. Tovar said Allen was calm the entire time.
“He didn’t flail. He didn’t panic,” he said. “He immediately went on his back. He knew what to do.”
The makeshift line broke once as a large wave hit Allen. Tovar’s wife, Dulce, raced back along the rocks asking others for their belts to construct a new line.
Andy Nelson of Portland was fifth in the row of helpers. After a few minutes he sent his son, Evan, 21, racing back over the rocks and up the path where he alerted a Forest Service volunteer to call 9-1-1. He returned with a ranger who had a rope and small life ring.
By then Allen had been in the water an estimated 10 minutes. He had gashes in his forehead, either from the fall or from banging on the rocks on an incoming tide.
Rescuers above were talking to Allen the entire time.
They knew they couldn’t lift Allen, who weighed 155 pounds, the 25-30 feet out of the chute. They were just trying to keep his upper body above the water until more help and equipment arrived.
They urged Allen to get his arm, shoulder and head through the life ring. He tried, but the ring was too small.
“He was fully aware and he could see us and the rope,” said Marty Gaughan of Portland, one of the bystanders with the line attempting to keep Allen afloat. “Sometimes he had the rope and sometimes he had the ring. But he couldn’t hold on.”
The Yachats Rural Fire Protection District got the first dispatch of a man in the water at 2:23 p.m. The ambulance left within two minutes. Yachats activated a Lincoln County inter-agency rope team at 2:25 p.m.
At 2:26 the U.S. Coast Guard 70 miles away in North Bend launched a helicopter with a rescue swimmer. At the same time a motor lifeboat raced out from Newport.
The Yachats ambulance arrived at the Devils Churn Day Use Area six minutes after it left the station four miles to the north. Two paramedics were aboard. A third followed in a truck.
Allen had been in the 52-degree water an estimated 20 minutes.
And then conflict arose.
Bystanders, paramedics disagree on response
While the bystanders tried to keep Allen alive, others were gathered near the bottom of the steps comforting Linda Allen. They were anxious, then angry.
Paramedics on the coast are trained to walk to the scene in pairs when responding to rescues in treacherous places, according to Yachats Fire Chief Frankie Petrick and Andy Parker, the Newport Fire Department member who oversees the rope team. That’s to make sure that one of them does not fall, creating a distraction for the partner who would have to stop to help or have no backup if he proceeded alone.
“That’s exactly what they should have done,” Petrick said. “You want to get there safely.”
The two Yachats paramedics walked down the path – it takes 3½ minutes – and then toward the east end of the chute. Timed this week, that should take another 2 minutes.
“We were saying “Hurry, he’s still alive’,” said Jill Wilson of Keizer, who had come to Devils Churn with Marty and Diane Gaughan to spread the ashes of a friend.
The paramedics, wearing floatation devices and each with a “throw bag” of rope, went to the south side of the chute. Some of the bystanders yelled at them to throw their ropes into the water so that Allen could grab ahold.
Nelson told YachatsNews that some of the rescuers began berating the paramedics as soon as they arrived at the chute. He believes by the time the paramedics got there Allen had turned face down and was drowned.
Tovar and Gaughan think Allen was still alive, or had a chance to be revived if he somehow could have been pulled from the water. Tovar feels the paramedics were poorly equipped for the situation.
“We tried to hold him up until rescue gets here and thinking they’ll have the right equipment,” Tovar said. “When those guys walked around the corner he was still alive.”
But Tovar and Gaughan said the Yachats responders looked into the chute and decided it was too late. “One of them just looked across at me and shook his head,” said Tovar.
Five days after the drowning, Tovar is back at work in Bakersfield but still seething over what he felt should have been a more robust response.
“These guys didn’t come down there with intent,” he said. “This guy’s life mattered … then to see these guys come down and do nothing, it bothers the heck out of me.”
At that point some of the bystanders both from the rescue group and the others with Linda Allen were surrounding and yelling at the paramedics. Allen said not using the throw bags “is what accelerated everything.”
“By then I knew Steve was gone but I hoped they could recover the body,” she said.
Petrick said the paramedics feared the crowd would turn on them, especially while they were close to the water. So they called Oregon State Police. A Forest Service ranger helped escort them back up the path.
Alone at the bottom of the trail, Petrick said her paramedics were being berated for something they felt they couldn’t fix – and at one point thought they were being urged to jump into the water.
“My crew endured a lot of name-calling,” Petrick told the district board during a regularly scheduled monthly meeting Monday. “It was not a good situation.”
Response different in rural, underserved areas
The rope rescue team is comprised of members from every Lincoln County fire department and the sheriff’s office. When activated each department determines if it has someone on duty to respond to wherever the scene might be.
Parker, the team leader, said three of the four Newport firefighters on duty last Thursday were sent. Others from Lincoln City, Waldport and Yachats joined the effort, and were under the direction of Petrick, who was the incident commander.
But by the time the team got to Devils Churn – it took 45 minutes from Newport and more than an hour from Lincoln City – the task was to see if they could help recover Allen’s body, not save him from drowning. They did not go down to the water, but set up a rope across the canyon from a viewing platform adjacent to the parking lot high above the churn and lowered a basket for a potential body recovery.
The Coast Guard rescue swimmer and another paramedic walked along the water below trying to spot Allen’s body.
“We are not water trained,” said Parker, explaining that’s now the purview of the Coast Guard. “We’re a high-angle rope rescue team” created to pluck people from cliffs and ravines.
The team had trained at Devils Churn 4-5 years ago, Parker said.
“That site is probably the most complicated technical rescue site in the county,” he said. “It’s extremely dangerous, hence the name.”
Parker said when people get pulled into the ocean in treacherous places it will be unusual that they are saved based on how long a response can take.
“We also have to weigh the risk-benefit,” he said. “What am I risking for my team member for what can be done?”
What makes the situation more traumatic, say Parker and Petrick, is that many visitors expect the same emergency response to a remote, rural area that they might get in Portland or the San Francisco Bay area.
“This is not like TV where people coming piling out of a fire truck,” Parker said. “One of the big challenges in this county is that we don’t have big staffing. They were lucky that Yachats (which had two firefighter/paramedics and an administrative assistant on duty) wasn’t on another call.”
Petrick said the Yachats paramedics had to make decisions based on their training and knowledge of the area.
“We have to ask ourselves ‘Am I going to be able to fix this situation or will I become part of the problem’,” she said. “It’s frustrating for us not to easily extradite these people from their situation.”
Watching the sun set
Steve Allen was born and raised in the Oakland area of California. He swam and played soccer and met his future wife at a local community college.
He went to work for his family’s building supply company, eventually taking it over with his brother. He married Linda on Oct. 29, 1977. When a national firm bought their company he went to work for them, traveling around California and to Texas and Florida to help turn around other operations.
“He loved people. He was such a people person,” Linda Allen said in an interview with YachatsNews. “I don’t think he had an enemy.”
They raised three boys – now 39, 36, and 33 — who are all in the Walnut Creek area. They have six grandchildren. Allen coached one son in soccer and more recently helped that son coach his daughters.
Linda Allen, a retired elementary school teacher, said her husband quit traveling so much when his first granddaughter was born, and then retired three years ago. He resumed working out, took up woodworking again, and started going to a men’s Bible study group.
“I was married to him for 43 years and these last years were the best ever,” she said.
Last week the Allens drove to Eugene to visit her sister, then over to Florence. They were staying in Gleneden Beach last Thursday when they decided to visit Cape Perpetua. They wanted to be back at their timeshare in time to watch the sunset and then head to Central Oregon on Friday.
“We knew high tide was at 3:16,” she said. “We had lunch in the car and then went down …”
That evening, after everyone but a fire chaplain and park ranger had left, Linda Allen stayed at Devil’s Churn until the sunset at 7:37 p.m.
“That was peace for me – that he and I were watching that sunset together,” she said. “And after that they took me back.”
Calls for after-action report
But Linda Allen wants an after-action review of the multi-agency response to her husband’s drowning. So do Tovar, Gaughan and Nelson.
She praises the bystanders’ attempts to keep her husband alive: “They thought they could save him, but they couldn’t do it on their own.” She hopes a review will determine if the response was appropriate and if the agencies had the right equipment and personnel.
“I don’t want this to happen to another family,” she said.
It is unclear if there will be such a review. Parker’s rope team debriefed that night before leaving. Petrick has talked to her three responders and met this week with Siuslaw National Forest managers to discuss the incident.
The Siuslaw National Forest officials said Wednesday they will work with Oregon State Parks to add warning signs near end of the trail. The agency does not plan to close the end of the trail because people will go over or around it, taking risker routes to the bottom “and create more issues than it solves,” spokeswoman Lisa Romano said in an email.
Because there is little to no cell phone service at the day use area, Romano said the agency is considering adding a cell phone booster to allow people to call out when the visitor information center is closed.
But Romano said the agency will listen to recommendations that they not replace the rescue ring “out of concerns for putting additional lives at risk.”
“Rescue rings or harnesses require training to understand how to use them without also putting the thrower in danger of slipping into the water,” Romano said in an email. “Forest Service employees and volunteers are not trained in this kind of difficult water rescue.”
Nelson, who heads a large Portland nonprofit helping the homeless, said he understands the anger and questions from his fellow rescuers. “My question – what is their protocol and what were the expectations,” he said.
Drew Tracy has been on the Yachats fire district board for almost two years. He’s a former assistant police chief in Montgomery County, Md., served as incident commander for the 2002 sniper attacks there when 26 people were shot, and has taught incident command systems for the U.S. State Department. He believes that an after-action review involving all the responders should always occur when there has been a fatality.
“Unless we look at these critical incidents they tend to repeat themselves,” Tracy told the fire board Monday. “It’s critical. It can only make responses better. You owe it to the families of the victim and the guys who were trying to help.”
Shoes wash back
Marty Gaughan is still haunted by Allen’s drowning. On Tuesday he returned to Devils Churn to spend some time there alone.
He walked to the end of the chute. There he spotted two white tennis shoes on the rocks where they had attempted the rescue.
Allen was wearing white Therafit brand shoes when he fell into the water. During the rescue attempt Allen had one shoe on and had lost the other.
Now they were back.
Gaughan gathered them and took them back to Portland. He sent a photo to Linda Allen, who confirmed that her husband was wearing white Therafit shoes when he died.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” Gaughan said. “I think there’s something larger at work here.”
Thursday afternoon, on his son Brian’s 33rd birthday, Steve Allen’s body washed ashore on the beach below Heceta Head lighthouse, 12 miles south of Cape Perpetua. Linda and Steve Allen had visited the lighthouse the day before he died.
Pultizer-Prize-winning journalist Quinton Smith is editor and owner of YachatsNews.org
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