The Man in the Potomac

Today, I thought of a man, whose name was unknown at the time that he became famous, who repeatedly handed over a life line thrown from a helicopter to his fellow survivors in the wintery waters of the Potomac River in Washington D.C. He was the only passenger, as we later learned, to have drowning declared as his cause of death.

I went looking for him today. His name was Arland Dean Williams Jr.

A Wikipedia article quotes the Washington Post's description of what happened after the crash of the passenger plane on January 13, 1982 and is worth quoting at length:

He was about 50 years old, one of half a dozen survivors clinging to twisted wreckage bobbing in the icy Potomac when the first helicopter arrived. To the copter's two-man Park Police crew he seemed the most alert. Life vests were dropped, then a flotation ball. The man passed them to the others. On two occasions, the crew recalled last night, he handed away a life line from the hovering machine that could have dragged him to safety. The helicopter crew - who rescued five people, the only persons who survived from the jetliner - lifted a woman to the riverbank, then dragged three more persons across the ice to safety. Then the life line saved a woman who was trying to swim away from the sinking wreckage, and the helicopter pilot, Donald W. Usher, returned to the scene, but the man was gone.

On January 25, 1982, Roger Rosenblatt, wrote a touching essay for Time Magazinehttp://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,925257-1,00.html on Arland Williams' extraordinary heroism.