As Violent Riptide Roared, A Human Chain Saved Lives

PANAMA CITY BEACH, FL — The grandmother was ready to die. "She looked right at Derek and told him, 'Let me go. Just let me die and save yourself.'" Those are the words of Jessica Simmons, who was enjoying Panama City Beach Saturday evening with her husband, Derek, when police lights drew her attention to almost a dozen people about 100 yards offshore, screaming for help.

They'd been dragged out to sea by a powerful riptide. Police on the Florida beach were waiting for a rescue boat. But dozens of beach-goers had another idea.

Joining hands, about 70 people jumped into the water and formed a human chain — using their bodies to bridge the distance between the stranded swimmers and the safety of dry land.

"To see people from different races and genders come into action to help total strangers is absolutely amazing to see!!" Simmons said on Facebook. "People who didn't even know each other went hand in hand in a line, into the water to try and reach them.

"Pause and just imagine that."

'I knew we had to do something'

Roberta Ursrey had just gotten out of the water when she turned around to look for her sons.

The Georgia native and correctional officer at Bay Correctional Facility in Panama City told the Panama City News Herald that when she did, the scene that was playing out terrified her.

The boys were much farther away from shore than she remembered and among a group of people who had been pulled forcefully into 15-foot-deep waters by the riptide. (Get Patch's Daily Newsletter and Real Time News Alerts. Or, if you have an iPhone, download the free Patch app.)

A riptide — or, more accurately, a rip current — is a hard-to-see type of current that occurs off beaches where there are breaking waves. They are strong, localized and narrow and strongest near the surface, with the power to drag away swimmers who then become prone to panic and exhaustion.

The boys were screaming and crying. Others on the beach told Ursrey not to go near the dangerous current. Ursrey didn't listen.

And when she and other family members, including her 67-year-old mother, got there, the strangers' ominous warnings played out. In their effort to be rescuers, they, too, became victims trapped in the riptide's watery grasp.

"I honestly thought I was going to lose my family that day," Ursrey told the paper. "It was like, 'Oh God, this is how I’m going.'"

In the end, there were 11 people struggling to survive in the riptide — nine adults and Ursrey's sons, Noah, 11, and Stephen, 8.

Meanwhile, back on the beach, people were mobilizing to help.

Simmons' husband Derek and his niece, Kate, began organizing people who, one by one, splashed out into the surf and began creating a human chain, according to Simmons.

Police had been called. But, according to Simmons, the responding officers were standing on the beach waiting for a rescue boat to arrive.

The beach-goers who rallied into action, though, weren't waiting for anything.

"I knew we had to do something ...," said Simmons, who calls herself a strong swimmer raised in pools and at the beach for as long as she can remember. "How can someone watch nine people struggle in a rip tide and watch them drown? Not me."

'These people were God's angels'

In the early going, about 50 people answered the call, some of whom, Simmons said, couldn't even swim. Locking arms and clasping hands, they spanned the distance to the struggling swimmers and, by the end of what would still be a lengthy rescue, the group had swelled to more than 70.

Relying on her strong swimming skills, Simmons told The Washington Post she swam off the end of the human chain to the victims. She and a few others began helping them one by one — children first.

Using surfboards and boogie boards as flotation devices for the panicked swimmers, they eased them, methodically, out of the riptide and to the end of the human chain. Once there, the long line of rescuers eased them body to body until they were back ashore.

In the end, everyone was rescued. But Ursrey told the Post that her mother suffered a heart attack in the process. She was the grandmother who, in Simmons' words, was prepared to die.

"She was so out of it that we couldn't keep her on the board ...," Simmons said, referring to a boogie board that rescuers had handed the woman. "She was so (limp), the waves were pushing her around like a rag doll."

Ursrey told the Panama City paper she doesn't remember anything about being rescued, just waking up onshore. Her mother, she said, nearly died in an ambulance but was revived by emergency workers. Her nephew broke a hand.

But everyone is alive and otherwise safe — facts that almost certainly wouldn't be true if total strangers hadn't joined hands to save them.

"These people were God’s angels that were in the right place at the right time," she told the Florida paper. "I owe my life and my family’s life to them. Without them, we wouldn’t be here."

Photo via Panama City Beach Convention & Visitors Bureau