Alabama Emergency-911 Director Wants To Make Salt Creek Falls Safer

A caravan of emergency vehicles glided up the gravel road, their tail lights blinking silently. Not long after, the half-dozen ambulances and search-and-rescue trucks were clustered at the mouth of a path leading into the darkened woods, the rescue personnel gone down the path, swallowed up in the forest.

Sweeping lights atop the trucks periodically painted tree trunks and the faces of the people huddled in the back of a pickup truck.

Two teenagers wrapped in towels stood with a young woman, and except for the looks on their faces, they could have just emerged from a summer swim. Their eyes were large with the innocent fear of children too young to have previously been brushed by death.

"He fell," one said.

And, although their skin had long-since dried, they shivered.

It is a scene all too familiar to rescue personnel of the counties surrounding this desolate spot.

Salt Creek, rushing from the Talladega National Forest and down the rocks above the town of Munford, has become a deadly lure, especially to those who think they know it well.

"They get out there on those rocks, and look at the falls," said Larry Wright, Talladega County E-911 administrator. "The falls are not straight down. They're at a 45-degree angle, so you hit the rocks before you hit the water."

The man who was injured at the falls recently was hospitalized locally, and only for a couple of days. His injuries were not serious.

Wright estimated that emergency personnel respond to an accident at Salt Creek Falls once or twice a year, and he believes there have been three deaths there in the past seven or eight years.

Although the Talladega National Forest boasts several beautiful waterfalls, including the popular swimming hole at Devil's Den near Lake Chinnabee, Salt Creek Falls is the one with the reputation as a dangerous place. The main reason is the accumulation of moss on the rocks at the top of the falls.

"Moss forms on those rocks," Wright said. "Tennis shoes and that moss just don't match. And the rocks at the bottom protrude out 5 or 6 feet."

Most of the people who have fallen reportedly have been climbing across the rocks at the top. They slip, and hit rocks all the way down.

Because Salt Creek Falls is in an isolated area, deep in the woods, it may take as long as 4 hours for rescue crews to get an injured person out. Usually, it involves stabilizing the victim first, then strapping him or her into a Stokes basket, which cradles the body and immobilizes broken limbs, while the victim is carried out.

Initial transport is by hand, because it is all uphill over rough terrain. Once on level ground, the injured person may be transported by hand or, occasionally, a "Gator" is called in. Cleburne County Rescue has one of these six-wheeled, all-terrain vehicles, specially equipped to carry an injured person.

Once out to the road, the victim is transferred into an ambulance to be carried out. Usually that is only as far as to wherever the Lifesaver helicopter has landed, which may be in a nearby pasture at Hopeful, or sometimes on the road that crosses the earthen dam at a summer camp about 2 miles down the road.

One problem the emergency personnel encounter in responding to calls at Salt Creek is the fact that it is located near the point where four counties meet: Talladega, Clay, Cleburne and Calhoun. Depending on where people are calling from, they might link up with 911 in any one of those counties, or even the city of Oxford.

According to Munford Volunteer Fire Department Chief Ricky Haynes, "it just depends on what tower they hit. If you dial 911 on your cell phone, who knows?"

The little gravel pull-off where most people go into the forest and down to Salt Creek is on the line between two counties. On the right side of the road is Clay County, and on the left side