A 28-year-old fisherman trapped beneath a massive boulder on an Oregon jetty is recovering after using his iPhone’s Siri assistant to call 911 when he could not reach the device himself.
Joe Little was fishing alone Saturday morning at the Hammond Marina jetty near Astoria, in Clatsop County, when a large rock shifted beneath him. His grandmother, Kelly Simonson, said Little felt the boulder begin to move and tried to brace it with his feet, but it was too big to stop.
“He said that he felt it start to move and he put his feet down to stop it, but the boulder was huge, and he slipped down and it just went over him,” Simonson said.
Little ended up pinned beneath the rock below the high tide line, meaning rising water posed an additional threat on top of his injuries. With his Bluetooth earbuds still paired to his phone, he was able to activate Siri and place a call to 911 around 7 a.m., according to his mother, Mindy.
Warrenton Police Department Sgt. Dylan McCoy said responding officers located Little by honking their patrol car horns while a 911 dispatcher asked him whether the sound was getting closer. Police then launched a drone over the jetty and spotted him pinned beneath the boulder, with only his upper body and feet visible.
Firefighters worked to free him by removing smaller rocks around the boulder. “They removed some of the smaller ones and that allowed them to move him from underneath the extremely large boulder which had trapped him,” McCoy said.
Given the hazardous terrain, first responders determined Little could not safely be carried out on foot and called in the U.S. Coast Guard. A Coast Guard helicopter arrived and lifted him from the scene by gurney.
Little suffered severe facial injuries, including a broken jaw, and faces an eight-hour facial reconstruction surgery. He is being treated at a hospital in Portland.
“His face got smashed. He’s almost unrecognizable,” Mindy said. “It’s a miracle that my son is alive.”
