High winds sweep 1500 United States river rafters to Canada

The straggling US citizens had to be rescued by all of Sarnia police, the OPP, the Canadian Coast Guard, Canada Border Service Agency, as well as workers from a nearby chemical company, Lanxess Canada.

They had been taking part in the annual Port Huron Float Down – where people use inflatable rafts to float down the St Clair River that divides MI from Ontario, Canada.

Peter Garapick of the Canadian Coast Guard, told CBC news: “There were people in places you’d never think something would float, but there were Americans everywhere”.

For their part, the US Coast Guard has attempted to work with the city of Port Huron to make the Port Huron Float down a sanctioned event, however no organisers have risen to the occasion. Hundreds of people on boats and inner tubes washed up in Canada from the United States due to stormy weather. The boaters were participants of the Float Down event (a yearly event on St. Clair River).

However, heavy winds diverted the floaters, turning a once-innocuous float fest into an global incident as the 1,500 people drifted ashore in Sarnia, Ontario. A combination of high winds (gusts up to 40km/h), choppy waters and rain made the conditions ripe for those floaters to head straight to Canada without any control over where they were going.

There were no significant injuries to the rafters, but it did take several hours for a bus service to shuttle the would-be boaters back across the border. But Canadian authorities seemed to handle it like pros. “They waited in long lines, cold, wet and exhausted, but they all got home safely”.

Canadian police across the river in Sarnia have long condemned the rafting event as risky and unusually hazardous because of the fast moving water and the large number of participants who don’t use life jackets. “They were very upset, cold and miserable”.