Part of the dive team is stationed on the west edge of Plummer Lake as one member get sonar pictures from a Chehalis Fire Department boat.
By Sharyn L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter
CENTRALIA – A dive team is looking for a man who vanished beneath the water at Plummer Lake in Centralia today.
Police and firefighters responded to an approximately 11:55 a.m. call to the large pond just east of Interstate 5.
A Centralia resident had been in a boat fishing and a witness saw him swimming toward his life vest and then go under water, never resurfacing, Centralia Police Department Sgt. Pat Fitzgerald said.
After an initial search by Centralia firefighters using the missing man’s boat, Chehalis firefighters brought their boat over and have been working this afternoon with members of the Thurston County Dive Team.
“They’re doing a grid search in the water,” Fitzgerald said.
Chehalis Fire Chief Ken Cardinale said the lake is very deep, and visibility good for only about 14 feet, so they began taking pictures with a sonar.
At least one woman who said she went to school with the victim was among the responders and guests of the Lakeview Inn who watched and waited on and near the motel’s lawn at the south shore.
Sixty-five-year-old Kermit Wood said when he saw the individual out there, it looked like he was splashing and trying to swim toward his life preserver. His empty boat was floating away, he said.
“Honestly, there was nothing we could do, and it was very difficult,” his wife Jackie Wood said.
Fitzgerald said he would be at the scene until the dive team left. They don’t work after dark, so depending on how it goes, they could return in the morning, he said.
Detective Dave Clary recalled the last time anyone drowned in the lake was in 2007, when 45-year-old Frank Mako died. His body was actually found just beyond the north shore, closer to Hayes Lake, he said.
Just this past May 30, another Centralia resident, 26-year-old Jessy Hamilton, drowned on the other side of Interstate 5, at Fort Borst Park near where the Chehalis River meets with the park’s pond.