Emergency crews focused their efforts around bridges and abutments along the Thames River between Mitchell and St. Marys Saturday as the search for a 10-year-old girl who fell through the ice near Mitchell last Sunday continued into its seventh day.
Emergency crews were rechecking bridges and abutments along the Thames River between Mitchell and St. Marys Saturday as the search for the 10-year-old girl who fell through the ice on Whirl Creek in Mitchell last Sunday continued for a seventh day.
While the sun was shining Saturday, Perth East-West Perth fire Chief Bill Hunter said firefighters were searching along the treacherous, iced-up riverbanks in areas that had previously been combed over to see if they could spot any sign of the girl that may have washed ashore or emerged from under the shifting ice overnight.
“We’re kind of retracing our steps,” Hunter said. “The weather’s sort of impacting where we want to go. We’re mainly concentrating around bridges and abutments where the river goes under the bridges in the Mitchell area heading south towards St. Marys.”
Hunter said his firefighters also responded to two motor-vehicle collisions Saturday morning, giving other area fire stations a break after they responded to many of the calls for service last week that firefighters from Mitchell and Sebringville would normally have responded to.
“We kind of scaled back as far as numbers today on the search to try to give people a little bit of a break, and mainly because of the weather,” Hunter said. “There’s a lot of slippery spots out there so we just kind of wanted to limit the number of people out walking.”
Hunter is once again cautioning area residents to stay away from the banks of local waterways as the recent thawing and freezing has made ice at the edge of rivers and creeks slippery and unstable.
Police and firefighters have since last Sunday been searching the tributaries of Whirl Creek – using divers and a helicopter – for the girl, who fell through ice around 10:30 am Sunday. The search area expanded to the Thames River in the Town of St. Marys on Thursday.
Hunter said Saturday’s search was purely a ground search and there were no divers in the water.