A heroic rescue by 20-year San Diego lifeguard veteran Marc Brown at an unforgiving site known as the “gorilla cage” in the Tijuana River Valley did not go unnoticed by the U.S. Lifeguard Association (USLA) or the city of San Diego, both of which have honored Brown for his courageous act. The San Diego City Council proclaimed Oct. 23 to be “Lifeguard Marc Brown Day,” and councilmembers Sherri Lightner and David Alvarez presented Brown with the USLA\u2019s highest honor \u2014 the Medal of Valor \u2014 to recognize his extraordinary act of bravery on a rainy night in November 2011. The rescue began when Brown and his sergeant, Troy Keach, were called to duty from their Mission Bay headquarters to the Tijuana River Valley. According to the emergency dispatcher, a suspected illegal immigrant was trapped inside a drainpipe near a water-treatment facility at the U.S.-Mexico border. Under the perilous circumstances, Brown\u2019s qualifications as a river-rescue team member warranted him the role as the lead rescuer at the scene. “The pipe drains from the top and it comes down this giant cement culvert at the bottom,” Brown explained. “There is a cage to protect all the debris, so you\u2019ve got tires, wood, plastic contaminants \u2014 anything you can possibly think of coming from the hillsides in Tijuana is coming down that pipe.” During heavy rains, Border Patrol agents open floodgates to a number of drainpipes, allowing water to dump into catch basins in the Tijuana River Valley to prevent flooding in Tijuana. On days with heavy downpours, immigrants attempting to illegally enter into the U.S. from Mexico use the drainpipes as passageways into the Tijuana River Valley. At this particular catch basin, a steel cage capped the drainpipe opening, shielding rescuers from the man trapped 20 feet below. “There\u2019s a two-foot opening that this person squeezed into and went down. He landed on a ledge that was no wider than a step with rebar coming out of the footing,” said Brown. “As I got down to him, he was standing there hanging onto this piece of nylon rope that the Border Patrol had thrown down to him.” With hundreds of gallons of water quickly rushing into the pipe, the man was quite literally teetering on the precipice of life and death. “It was just a giant, black hole. The pipe extends another quarter of a mile underneath the ground,” he said. “Inside the pipe, there is just a bunch of debris. You\u2019ve got rocks, boulders \u2014 whatever you can think of is in there. Everything in there is going to be a hazard, or it\u2019s going to be something you\u2019re going to get snagged upon and basically drown.” The darkness in the pipe and the strength of the water hammering down impaired Brown\u2019s senses throughout the rescue. “I couldn\u2019t see. I\u2019m having to lower down and have water completely dousing on top of me, so my sense of whereabouts are skewed,” Brown said. “As I\u2019m getting lowered, I don\u2019t want to knock him off the ledge. It\u2019s a small, two-foot-by-eight-inch step that he\u2019s stepping on and he\u2019s being pounded by water.” To make matters worse, the pipe was bound to fill up at any second, creating an inherent sense of urgency. After several long minutes, Brown was able to strap a chest harness on the man and make the arduous journey upward together. “Coming back up, you\u2019re just meeting so much resistance. It was even more of a challenge because you fight your [harness] system, and you have hundreds and hundreds of gallons of water that\u2019s just knocking on top of you that you\u2019re fighting as they\u2019re pulling you up,” he said. “All the forces are going against you, and you\u2019re just hoping, \u2018Please, something don\u2019t break.\u2019” Just minutes after Brown\u2019s successful rescue, the pipe overflowed with water. Had Brown delayed on any number of factors, the rescuers may have been pulling up two lifeless bodies instead. Thanks to Brown\u2019s unwavering confidence, level-headedness and quality training, both men were retrieved from the pipe unscathed and Brown was appropriately honored for his selfless act of courage and skill. Despite the peril, Brown said he had no reservations about going down to execute the swift-water rescue. “It just comes with the job. That\u2019s why I\u2019m on the river-rescue team. That\u2019s one of the things that \u2014\u00a0being a lifeguard \u2014\u00a0you love to do is to help people and save people,” he said. “That\u2019s what you\u2019re in it for. You\u2019re not in it for the accolades or the awards or anything like that.” With wife Kerry and two young children \u2014 Bridget, 3, and Nathan, 1 \u2014 at home, Brown is cognizant of the fact that his family needs him to be a father and husband, not necessarily a hero or a cowboy. “You have precious cargo that wants to see you on a daily basis at home, so just keep that as a mental note in the back of your mind. Do your job and do your job well, but don\u2019t be reckless,” he said. “If you can do what you can do based on your training ability and your experience and the equipment that you have, then that\u2019s what\u2019s going to make a successful rescue. You\u2019re not going to run into a burning building without any rescue experience and without any gear. That\u2019s just suicide.” Despite his mantra of “Don\u2019t be a hero,” Brown set himself apart as one of San Diego\u2019s lifesaving forces, a man who voluntarily risked his life to save another and creating for himself a heroic role in the eyes of the community.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A heroic rescue by 20-year San Diego lifeguard veteran Marc Brown at an unforgiving site known as the “gorilla cage” in the Tijuana River Valley did not go unnoticed by the U.S. Lifeguard Association (USLA) or the city of San Diego, both of which have honored Brown for his courageous act. The San Diego City […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":256987,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11559","_seopress_titles_title":"MB lifeguard earns Medal of Valor for heroic rescue","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11559,11551],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-256986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-beach-bay-press","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256986\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}