Family’s boat sank in Lake Murray July 4 parade
A family is thankful to be safe after their boat sank to the bottom of Lake Murray during the annual Fourth of July boat parade.
The Burlesons were lined up with their two children for the boat parade Saturday when heavy waves caused by the wake of passing boats overtook their craft and it began to sink from taking on the water.
“Our boat was a small 16-foot 1983 beechcraft,” Nichole Burleson wrote on the family’s GoFundMe fundraiser. “As our nose dipped from going over one wake, another huge one went straight over the open bow and over took our boat.”
The family escaped with only minor cuts and bruises, she said, but their boat — along with their cell phones, keys, tools and other belongings — was underwater within seconds.
A military family who just moved to the area after Burleson’s husband was posted to Fort Jackson, they were worried about how to afford the cost of retrieving their boat from the lake.
“We are dealing with a family member dying of cancer, our home hvac system just went out, and our transmission on my van,” Burleson wrote on the fundraising website. “So we have no savings left to put towards this cost.”
But salvage companies have reportedly offered to help the family get their boat back free of charge.
“It was a military family, someone that’s defending our freedom, in a boat parade, celebrating the country’s birth of its freedom,” Rick Kahn, owner of Tow Boat US, told WACH FOX. “And they have an unfortunate accident were the boat goes down. It just kinda hit us hard, and we realized it’s something we had to help with.”
Kahn told WLTX his crew would “go out on Tuesday morning at nine and run some GPS searches in some of the locations ... where the boat supposedly went down,” he said. Divers would then work to pull the sunken beechcraft out of Lake Murray, a service that would normally cost the family thousands of dollars.
Not that the family is eager to get back on the water anytime soon. Burleson told the TV stations her children are now too frightened to get back in a boat. “They were scared of the boat regardless,” she told WLTX. “This was a nail in the coffin for boating.”
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