A walk along the North Saskatchewan River near the Cloverdale foot bridge Sunday took a turn when a woman fell down a steep embankment and into the water, but a friend was able to get her out.
Face down and unconscious, 18-year-old Maia Stock needed her friend’s help to get out of the cold water, but they remained stranded because their cellphones were dead, and the city’s emergency blue phone was removed due to construction work on the LRT line.
“I’m lucky my friend was able to lift me out of the water,” Stock told CTV Edmonton. “I’m surprised I didn’t get hurt worse. I woke up and I was just in immediate, bad pain. It wasn’t fun laying there for like an hour and a half just in the mud.”
With a broken arm and a concussion, Stock, and her friend, had to wait until a jogger with a phone passed by and called 911.
The LRT project will soon close the bridge and the paths surrounding it, but Stock’s mother, Barb Wilkinson, thinks that the emergency phone should have been active.
“The bridge is still here, so it’s a bit hard to understand why they did that,” Wilkinson said. “Emergencies happen and people need them.”
With files from Dan Grummett.
