Woman, dog rescued from pond near Harry and Webb

Cindy Webb and Apryl Cornell had never been to Harrison Park before, but it seemed a convenient place to go for a walk Tuesday on their lunch break.

“We’re going to start exercising and today was just the day, I guess,” said Cornell, who works with Webb as a hospice nurse at Good Shepherd Hospice.

They were more than a lap into their walk at the park, next to Webb and north of Harry, shortly after noon when a couple began yelling at them from the other side of the pond on the east end of the park.

“Call 911! Call 911!”

“We just kind of looked at each other and said, ‘Is this a crazy person?’” Cornell said.

But as they reached the north side of the ice-covered pond, they saw a woman in the water clinging to a small dog with one arm and the edge of a thin sheet of ice with the other. Cornell called 911 as Webb ran to the edge of the pond and began talking to her.

“I was afraid she would go unresponsive,” Webb said.

They had seen the woman get out of a car with her dog on their first lap around the park – and now they saw them in the water.

Webb asked the woman about her family, her dog’s name – Misty – and anything else she could think of that would require her to respond. She kept telling the woman to move her legs. Time and again, the ice she was clinging to would break away and she would have to prop herself up on another piece of the thin ice sheet.

“At one point she quit talking and kind of laid her head back, and I just started screaming at her,” Webb said.

They could hear the sirens of approaching fire trucks, the co-workers said, so they knew help was on its way.

Her voice nearly choking with emotion, Webb said she thought “You’re not dying with us here,” as the woman in the water went still.

“You’re going to stay with us,” Webb told the woman. “You’re going to make it through this.”

Cornell called those moments “terrifying.”

“We didn’t know what was going to happen,” she said.

Firefighters arrived and were able to get a long rope with a bag on the end of it out to the woman in the water. With great effort, she was finally able to wrap the bag around her wrist. Rescuers pulled her and the dog to safety, at one point using long poles to help pull them ashore.

She was rushed to Wesley Medical Center for treatment, her dog to a veterinary hospital.

“She was having a little trouble breathing,” Battalion Chief Richard Bahr said of the victim. “She was suffering from a mild case of hypothermia.”

Webb said she thought “Not again,” when they first saw the woman in the middle of the pond trying to save her dog. She remembered the tragic story of Erika Owen, 28, who died Sunday trying to rescue her dog from a pond at Chisholm Creek Park near K-96 and Woodlawn.

“We’re trying to urge all people to stay off the ice,” Bahr said.

At this time of year, as temperatures start to warm a little, “the ice is not thick enough to support body weight,” he said.

People should resist the temptation to go in after their dog if the pet wanders out onto the ice and falls into the water, Bahr said.

“If the dog’s in there, the dog’s probably going to be fine,” he said. “We’ll get to the dog as soon as we can.”

There’s no question about the significance of the role Webb and Cornell played in Tuesday’s rescue, Bahr said.

“They saved her life,” he said.

The woman was quite weak when first responders arrived, Bahr said.

“She was going down for the second or third time as the rescuers were getting out there to get her,” Bahr said.

Webb and Cornell said they consider the firefighters the real heroes. They simply did what they could to help.

But the collision of coincidences did catch Webb’s attention. She told Cornell, “Maybe we were meant to be here at this time.”

They were going to be late getting back to work Tuesday afternoon, but they had a good excuse.

“It’s, like, a good feeling that we helped save them,” Webb said of the woman and her dog. “I don’t know how to explain it.”

As hospice nurses, Cornell said, “We’re on the other end of the spectrum” of life.

After what happened Tuesday, though, “we kind of wondered if we’re in the right field.”

This story was originally published March 3, 2015 at 1:23 PM with the headline "Woman, dog rescued from pond near Harry and Webb."