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One man drowned and another is missing in separate swimming mishaps near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers Friday night.
Both men went missing in the Columbia River, near popular beaches where strong currents can quickly overwhelm swimmers. Temperatures Friday reached 90 degrees, leading many people to swimming spots.
The Multnomah County Sheriff's Office says its Marine Unit received a call to Sauvie Island at 5:48 pm Friday night. "The responding agencies were told that a male swimmer was in distress and went under the water," says sheriff's office spokesman Sgt. Brandon Pedro.
Five law-enforcement agencies searched for the man without success. The sheriff's office dive team wasn't able to reach the spot before sundown, Pedro says, so it began searching for the man at 10 am today, then suspended that search at 5 pm.
The Multnomah County Sheriff's Office is not yet releasing the man's name, but say he was visiting from outside the Portland region.
Four hours later, the sheriff's office responded to a call about a swimmer who had gone under the water of the Columbia River at Kelley Point Park, at the northernmost edge of Portland. River Patrol arrived and at 11:10 pm recovered the body of a man who had drowned.
The swimmer was 22-year-old Carlos Lara-Escudero. He was from Portland.
Kelley Point Park, where the Columbia and Willamette rivers meet, is a dangerous place to swim. In the summer of 2016, the beach there closed for a week, after two people—a 10-year-old girl and a man in his 20s—drowned in less than two weeks. The city's park bureau installed two new signs reading "Do not enter water," bringing the total number of signs with such warnings up to about three dozen.