Quest for giant clam almost turns deadly

Harold Thomas wasn't having any luck finding clams Thursday afternoon. So, the lifelong clammer ventured farther onto the mud flats at Penrose Point State Park on the Key Peninsula and started digging in the muck for a geoduck.

As he tried to wrestle a giant clam from its burrow, Thomas felt himself sinking. He pulled his right foot out of its rubber boot, but that just made his left foot sink deeper. As he tried to pull his left ankle free, Thomas' right foot became stuck in the mud.He tried to dig himself out with a shovel, but that didn't work. His wife, Carol, wrapped her arms around him and pulled. Nothing. Two women came to help, then a man and his son.

Thomas didn't budge. And the tide was coming in.

Carol Thomas called 911. The water -- which was 50 feet away when Harold Thomas started digging for the geoduck -- had reached his knees. Six minutes later, the first firefighters arrived. They waded out and found Thomas waist-deep in water, the mud sucking at his thighs. The firefighters tried to pull him from the mud, but couldn't. They put a life jacket on Thomas and tied a line around his body.

The water kept rising. It was so cold, Carol Thomas could see her husband's hand turn white as she held it in her own. The firefighters shooed her back to shore, where she stood on the beach with the others who'd helped try to free her husband.

"We just stood there on the spit and prayed," Carol Thomas said Friday from her home near Purdy, Pierce County. "I prayed for wisdom and discernment for the fire department people."

Out in the water, Harold Thomas began to panic. But then, "a calmness came over me," said the 65-year-old retired shipyard machinist. "I knew they'd get me out of there."

Battalion Chief Hal Wolverton of the Key Peninsula Fire Department wasn't so sure. He considered calling for a Coast Guard helicopter or maybe a Pierce County dive team but knew Thomas didn't have that kind of time. He called the Anderson Island Fire Department, and they sent out a rescue boat. Twenty minutes seemed an eternity. Wolverton's crew stood by with snorkels.

The boat arrived, but even then, rescuers couldn't pull Thomas from the mud. The water lapped at his shoulders.

Then Wolverton had an idea: "I don't know how it came to me," he said Friday. "... I don't think they all had faith in my theory. They all gave me the eyebrow."

Wolverton connected a 200-foot long fire hose to the boat's fire pump. At the other end, he attached a 4-foot-long penetrating nozzle, a rod-shaped piece of equipment firefighters use to bust through roofs to pour water on a blaze. The firefighters stuck the nozzle into the sand around Thomas' legs, and the "turbulent action" from the pressurized water finally broke "the suction that was holding him there," he said.

"He popped out like a big, giant geoduck," Wolverton said.

Thomas, who'd spent 45 minutes in frigid Puget Sound, was loaded into an ambulance and rushed to St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma. His wife, a nurse, was close behind in the family car. Thomas was hypothermic, and it took hours for the warming blankets to raise his body temperature back to acceptable levels. He was released about 9 p.m.

"I'm sore," Thomas said Friday. "My back and my neck hurt from people yanking on me and pulling on me."

Thomas said he's gone clam digging all his life and checked to see when the tide would be coming in before he left home on Thursday. And while Thomas is a little embarrassed about his ordeal, he and his wife agreed to share their story to warn others.

"It just happens fast -- you just don't expect the sand to hold you like that, to take you down," said Carol Thomas, 61. "If it can happen to us, it can happen to anyone. ... It was frightening. I was afraid for his life."

Sara Jean Green: 206-515-5654 or sgreen@seattletimes.com

The caption to a photograph accompanying this article, originally published May 10, 2008, was corrected May 10, 2008. Harold Thomas did not return to Penrose Point State Park after his rescue to be photographed. A photo caption Saturday said he was at Penrose, but the photograph was taken at a beach in Purdy, Pierce County.