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Show Repair Job, Done Under Water, Saves Six From Sudden Death ANIGHT boat ride on a calm inland in-land lake turned into a sudden life-or-death struggle when a broken outboard motor threatened to send a party of six crashing down the spillway spill-way of the big Imperial Dam at Somerton, Arizona. The half dozen young men and girls were a mile from shore when the boat struck something and the propeller stopped. It was found that the shear pin connecting propeller 1 and motor had been snapped off. The strong current running toward the dam began drawing the boat and its occupants backward. The boatload of merrymakers was now headed toward the whirlpool where the water drops through steel gates into the concrete spillway below. be-low. One young fellow, TeX- Ferguson, Fergu-son, seized a a new shear pin and went overboard into the icy water with a flashlight in his hand. As Ferguson hit the water, the' flashlight, loaded with ordinary bat- LA,iits A : ill x-;:r:iia Charles Green teries, went out like a match. It left him in the dark groping for the tiny hole in the propeller shaft. Meanwhile the boat was picking up momentum rapidly. A companion, Charles Green, of Somerton, grabbed his flashlight, which he had recently loaded with fresh batteries. He plunged the light into the water so that its brilliant beam shone directly upon the propeller pro-peller shaft. In a few seconds Ferguson Fergu-son had completed the repairs. The wall of the dam was already looming overhead with the spillway, only a few yards off, as the boat got under way. "If it had not been for the fresh batteries in our second flashlight," Green said, "we were finished. Probably Prob-ably none of us would have survived the plunge into the spillway." The accident was found to have been caused by the propeller striking strik-ing the top of a cottonwood tree, one of a row that grew out of the top of a levee before the lake was made. |