Christensen jogged down the offramp, turned left and raced on to the water park.
He told another district employee, “Why don’t we take a ride over there?”īy the time they got to the Willow Pass exit in Concord, it was blocked by the CHP to facilitate the flow of emergency vehicles to the scene. Relative to today’s world, news of the accident moved at a glacial pace.Ĭhristensen was in a meeting when he was told there had been a mishap on the senior trip. As a means of communication, email might have lagged behind the pager. Initially, you have that momentary, ‘Holy crap.’ But then you’re thinking, I’ve got to make some order out of this.” I had five officers already and more coming. “I saw a lot of obviously hurt people laying on the ground. “It was momentarily somewhat overwhelming,” he said. “I served 13 months in Vietnam,” said Jennings, who retired as captain in 2004. Jim Jennings, then a Concord Police Department lieutenant and one of the first responders to the scene, had. “That degree of shock,” he said, “I hadn’t experienced that before.” Snowden made his way down what was left of the slide to a hellish scene - blood, bodies, visible trauma. Somebody saw his girlfriend fall, and he jumped. “We were very motivated to get off the slide. “You could feel it sway and bow, and down it goes,” he said. Chris Snowden, the student body president, was below the break. One section of the slide had dropped out of sight like some kind of fiendish trap door. Dwarfed by the dangling portion of the broken Water World, slide an employee photographs the site of a June 1997 accident that injured over two dozen Napa High students.(Contra Costa Times/Karl Mondon/June 2, 1997) Young adults pitched 30 to 40 feet to the ground. “And the bodies came falling out of the sky.” “The students described the noise like a loud crack,” said Lars Christensen, principal of Napa High in 1997, who was not on the trip. It was like the platform was just an arm’s length away, but I couldn’t reach it. As soon as I felt myself starting to fall, my brain shut off.” “I remember starting to fall and trying to grab onto something. “The sound of fiberglass cracking is ingrained in my mind forever,” said Alynda, who now goes by her married name of Davis. Around 2:45 p.m., the overburdened slide, designed for one rider at a time, failed. The class of ’97 was attempting the largest clog in school history. In so doing, they would remain forever young. In so doing, they would uphold a school tradition. One last adventure before being scattered to the wind. Finally, bursting with life and youth and under a glorious late spring sun, the students, some of whom had been friends since kindergarten, would let go and slide down en masse. Then more students would jam in behind them, followed by more, and still more joining the joyous pigpile. Once on the slide, they would grip the sides, holding themselves in place. Here was the plan:Ī few would start down one of the meandering slides that emptied into a pool at ground level. Hearing the call to return to the buses, the students raced to the park’s 40-foot tower. But at that point, it would be time to go home anyway. They knew they might get booted from the park for what they were about to do. That’s why seniors from Napa High School, class of 1997, waited until the end of their senior trip to Concord’s water park - June 2 20 years ago this week.
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