Someone called authorities in the Sioux City metro early Monday afternoon to say a young woman they saw get into the Missouri River had disappeared.
Rescue teams from both sides of the river launched their boats and Lieutenant Joe Rodriquez says within 10 minutes firefighters spotted the woman floating in the middle of the river and pulled her out of the water. “She was probably in the river about half an hour before we were notified,” he says.
Rodriquez says the woman wasn’t struggling and did not appear to be in danger. “She was just floating down the river,” Rodriquez says. “Don’t know the purpose behind or her reasoning behind why she was in the rier, but she was just going for a swim in the river.”
Sioux City officials — on both sides of the river — do not recommend swimming in the Missouri, even during a 100 degree day like Monday. “We always do not recommend anybody going into the Missouri River without the proper precautions and obviously a life preserver or anything that could assist you in that,” Rodriquez says. “The river is very dangerous and treacherous underneath the current and the undertow as well, and you also don’t know what’s coming from underneath the water from upstream.”
Rodriquez did not have the name or age of the woman who did go for a swim in the Missouri River on Monday shortly after one o’clock.
(Reporting by Woody Gottburg, KSCJ, Sioux City)