“It is an extraordinary case that the girl’s body overcame all possible obstacles in the Nemunas,” thought Artūras Petrovas, who works as a shift commander in the 5th team of the Kaunas Fire Rescue Board.
A 22-year-old girl who came from Kretinga to Kaunas to study lived in a dormitory located in the Academy (Kaunas district). Just before the tragedy, she wrote several messages on social networks in which she complained about being bullied and named the alleged abusers – three young men and one girl. All of them study at higher education institutions in Kaunas.
“I am on the Radzinauskas (Lampėdžių) bridge. I don’t want to live in a world where abusers win,” the student wrote on Facebook on the night of January 12, around 4 o’clock. After that, no one saw her anymore, the phone didn’t work.
From the first days of the search, officers combed the banks of the Nemunas River, the entrances to the dormitory where the girl lived, drones were also raised, police canine specialists with service dogs were used, and video camera footage was reviewed.
The divers of the fire department were not able to search underwater at first because of the iceberg that endangered them, but after a while the natural conditions allowed it, and the search was carried out in Nemunas. They were not successful.
Russian border guards found the girl’s body on April 13 near the city of Neman. The mother of the student identified her daughter according to the photos provided by Interpol, which show remnants of clothing.
Representatives of the Kaunas County Chief Police Commissariat reported that Russian officials are currently conducting the investigation, so the body of the Lithuanian woman has not been handed over to her relatives.
“It is a rare case that a body floats so far in such a winding river,” said rescuer A. Petrovas. A Kaunian is an extremely experienced diver who has been working for many years.
He and his colleagues were even more surprised by the fact that the weather conditions were unfavorable for the body to swim far, because immediately after the event, the cold began, and soon after, the ice pack.
In such conditions, the human body is often vulnerable to ice floes, but this time it did not happen.
Local rescuers know very well the places where to look for drowned people in Kaunas. All of them are near the city.
“Usually within 4 days, drowning people reach Raudone, Kulautuva or Zapyškis church entrances, due to the bends of the Nemunas riverbed, they end up on the shore and are noticed by people”, revealed A. Petrovas.
According to the diver, the time the body spends in the water and the distance covered depends on many circumstances: time of year, water depth and temperature, gender of the drowned person, clothes worn.
“It is important whether a person died after hitting the surface of the water or drowned later,” A. Petrovas testified.
He reminded us that the human body weighs up to 1 kilogram in water, and clothing can both add to and reduce buoyancy. A human body can move along the bottom of a river for a while before biological processes force it to the surface. The body can get caught on tree branches or swim aground and not move at all for a while, only to move away again when the water level rises.
“The speed of the Nemunas current varies from 0.5 to 2 meters per second. It can swim 2 kilometers per hour, and 40-60 kilometers per day”, A. Petrovas calculated. However, due to various circumstances, this path is usually shorter.
Divers know that after a person drowns at a shallow depth, after 3-4 hours the body rises to the surface and is carried further by waves and wind. For this reason, the body is often found in a completely different place than the witnesses indicated.
“Many factors need to be taken into account every time”, A. Petrovas assured.
According to him, the search in the river is much more complicated than in the lake. The water of Lithuanian rivers is not transparent, the visibility reaches only 1-2 meters.
When the exact location of a person’s drowning is known, the divers themselves are released from it by the free current. Where it takes a diver, a drowning man is usually found there.
Even a person’s gender affects drowning. According to A.Petrov, it is almost impossible to drown a child, because his buoyancy is +2 kilograms.
Additional weights would be needed to drown a chubby woman. Meanwhile, a muscular, athletic man is literally sinking “with an ax to the bottom”.
A.Petrov had no doubt that sooner or later the corpses would be found. He remembered the case at the Kruonis hydroelectric power plant (Kaishiadorii district), when two fishermen who were sailing in a boat drowned. One person was found only after 7 months, his friend – after another couple of weeks.
In this case, the search was complicated by the fact that the depth of the water in this body of water reaches 38 meters, and its temperature in the lower layers reaches only 4-8 degrees.
In cold water, the body can stay at the bottom for 1-2 days, because biological processes take place very slowly. In very warm water, it emerges within a few hours.
Tags: diver students body washed Kaunas Kaliningrad region Extraordinary case
-
