Inside The Whitewater Accident That Led To An Underwater Amputation (Video)

On Nov 22, 2024, a Lithuanian whitewater rafter with 50 years of experience was scouting rapids on the remote Franklin River in Tasmania when he slipped, falling into the rapids and wedging his leg between the rocks. So began a more than 20 hour rescue effort that culminated in an underwater above-the-knee amputation, a story now documented in an Australian Story documentary The River.

“How does someone’s leg go into a crack and not come out? Like, surely there’s a way. There’s always a way. And there wasn’t,” Rohan Kilham, a paramedic on the scene shared in the documentary. “I remember the Lithuanian doctor sort of asking… he’s dead isn’t he? And I couldn’t say yes but I… I definitely couldn’t say no.”

From an epic rafting trip to a desperate rescue

Valdas Bieliauskas and his friends aimed to raft one river on every continent and Australia was their final destination. On Nov 22 the group was using a drone to scout the Coruscades rapids and made the decision not to run them. It was in the process of scouting these rapids that Bieliauskas, jumping from rock to rock, slipped into the river–an incident caught on camera from several angles.

Bieliauskas fell on his back and turned over; somehow his leg got wedged in a small gap between two rocks. His friends fixed him with safety ropes and tried to extract him from the hole without hurting him, but Bieliauskas’ leg was stuck. For nearly 40 minutes they worked at freeing Bieliauskas before making the decision to send out an SOS signal via satellite phone.

Rescuers later estimated the water temperature to be 8-10 degrees Celsius (46-50 Fahrenheit).

Five hours after Bieliauskas fell, the rescue team arrived. Pilots ruled out landing on the scene and needed instead to winch first responders down into the ravine. A new helicopter circled every few hours bringing in different specialists and new equipment. Communication out of the ravine was unreliable.

First, they tried to manually manipulate the leg by pushing and pulling. Then, they tried a sling around the leg.

“65-year-old male, fit, well. No medical history, no daily medications. He seems to be for the most part in relatively good spirits and we’re doing our best to keep him warm,” said one of the rescue team members in a debrief on the scene after dark. At this point Valdas had been in the water more than five hours.

Adrain “Ace” Petrie, a swiftwater rescue technician, on the scene shared with ABC News that during the rescue you could feel the pressure of the water like an undertow pulling to where Bieliauskas’ leg was stuck.

When they couldn’t free Bieliauskas’ leg manually, they tried spreaders, then a hydraulic jack and airbags to move the rock itself, all to no avail. The team discussed jack hammering the rock but decided there was too much potential that it would make things worse.

“There was an understanding across our group that if anyone had an idea as far-fetched as it might be in any combination of our equipment,” said Mitch Parkinson, a paramedic, in the documentary, “We would try every single one.”

A difficult decision

As efforts wore on through the night it became increasingly apparent that Bieliauskas’ knee was stuck in such a way that rescuers would have to break it to pull it out. Throughout the rescue Bieliauskas’ friends communicated with him to help him translate and brought him hot food.

Kilham shared that it took a while for Bieliauskas to become dangerously hypothermic. “Even into the early hours of the morning Valdas was actually doing remarkably well,” Kilham said in the documentary.

“You could see the determination in Valdas’s eyes. Even though his body was deteriorating he was not giving up,” shared Petrie.

By the morning of Nov 23, Bieliauskas had been in the water about 16 hours. At this point the rescue team decided to make one more attempt to pull Bieliauskas out – an attempt that would involve breaking his leg to free him. The attempt failed. The team had one course of action left.

“It was a big mental hurdle, realizing that we were now going to cut his leg off. I felt so conflicted. I’d never ever had to hurt someone to save their life,” Kilham said in The River.

Arvyadas Rudokas, Bieliauskas’ friend and Lithuanian rafter and doctor, explained to Bieliauskas that they were preparing to amputate his leg and this was the only chance he had. He explained to Bieliauskas that he may become handicapped but if they did not do this he would die.

Bieliauskas nodded his head and 19 hours after his initial fall, the team began to prepare for amputation. As the preparations began, Dr. Nick Scott slipped and broke his wrist and so with the team now 20 hours into the mission they decided it was time to request new personnel.

Underwater amputation in a rapid

“I must admit I was pretty horrified,” said Dr. Jorian “Jo” Kippax in the documentary, coming into what he described as an overwhelming scene. There was about a 10-minute handover and it was impressed upon Kippax that the amputation needed to happen immediately.

Complications continued: due to the rushing water it was initially difficult to get a tourniquet on. They couldn’t use general anesthesia due to the angle of Bieliauskas’ head; they used Ketamine instead. Generally, amputations are done visually; with Bieliauskas’ leg submerged, Kippax opted to not wear gloves in order to better feel what was happening beneath the water. Halfway through sawing through the femur, the saw broke. Kippax broke Bieliauskas’ femur and he was free. There was no gush of blood, and the entire procedure took about two minutes.

“No one ever trains to amputate a leg above the knee under water in the wilderness with no resources in a rapid on belay. It’s such an extraordinary circumstance,” said Kilham in the documentary.

When Rudokas saw Bieliauskas as he was pulled from the river, he thought his friend was dead.

The doctors anticipated Bieliauskas would have cardiac arrest due to hypothermia when they got him up. Bieliauskas’ heart rate slowed and he stopped breathing after a half hour and was connected to a ventilator. As a helicopter circled to extract Bieliauskas, his heart stopped and the rescuers performed CPR and put him on a mechanical CPR device. Bieliauskas and Kippax were winched out.

By the time Bieliauskas reached the Hobart hospital he had been on the CPR machine for an hour and a half, and was in a coma for four days before he woke. Not long after, he met Kippax, the man who amputated his leg in a rapid.

“I survived. I endured. That’s the greatest joy,” Bieliauskas told ABC News after the accident. “As for the leg, that’s not a problem. The main thing is being alive and life is a beautiful thing.”