Myers Flat Is Where It’s At: Campground Guests Saved a Woman’s Life on the Eel River

You might spot the bumper sticker on an older, dust-covered rig somewhere in Southern Humboldt — faded letters, maybe peeling at the corners — and wonder if it’s some kind of joke. Myers Flat is where it’s at. Driving through, it’s easy to be skeptical. The little town sits just off Highway 101 along the Avenue of the Giants, its main frontage street propped up by the surviving Redwoods Market and Deli, most of the other storefronts long shuttered. The redwoods tower over everything. This Memorial Day weekend, the campers tucked in among those trees would save a stranger’s life.

Pull off the highway, wind back toward the river, and something changes. The Giant Redwoods RV & Cabin Destination sits tucked against the South Fork Eel, ringed by Humboldt Redwoods State Park, privately owned riverfront rare enough in these parts to feel like a secret. Park managers Kimberly Chase and Michael Lewis say they hear the same thing from guests over and over.

“People don’t know we’re here,” Chase said, “and then when they find us, it’s kind of a little hidden gem, or an oasis. People come here to rest and reconnect with their family and their friends. We have a lot of people that this is their meeting spot.”

Families drive up from the Bay Area and Santa Rosa to escape the summer heat. Those coming down from Eureka and the fog belt find the sun returns just past Rio Dell. “Once you get past Rio Dell, it’s like the sun comes out,” Chase said. “We’re about 10 to 15 degrees warmer all the time.” Brianna Hewitt, a stay-at-home mom whose family made the six-hour drive from Orangevale in the Sacramento Valley, found the park online last year while planning a trip to Eureka for the Kinetic Sculpture Race. On their first visit to the RV park, she said they weren’t sure what they were getting into.* “We kind of joked that when you’re driving through, like, ‘Where are we going? What is this place?'” she said. They went through the gates and loved it. They returned this year, bringing friends with them.

On Memorial Day weekend this year, the park was full of regulars. Many of them, by chance, happened to work in medicine.

Myers Flat was, in fact, where it was at.

Down at the River

A 47-year-old woman was wading in the river below the campground when she collapsed down on the far bank. A couple on the beach had nearly left their standup paddleboard at home that weekend. They didn’t. That detail would matter.

Dr. Abdul Abdali, a hospitalist and chair of medicine at St. Joseph Hospital in Eureka, had just arrived at the river with his family when he spotted her at the water’s edge.

“Almost immediately it was very obvious that this wasn’t someone that had just fallen down,” he said.

He crossed the river. She had no pulse. The woman’s husband and Abdali pulled her from the water and started CPR.

“She was halfway in the water,” Abdali said. “The family member that was with her was giving her mouth-to-mouth, trying to keep her out of the water.”

On the campground side of the river, word spread fast. Isabel O’Shaughnessy, a registered nurse with 16 years of experience, had just pulled in with her family and was barely parked when she heard the screaming from the riverbank.

“I literally just ran as fast as I could,” O’Shaughnessy said. “Ran across the sand in the heat, ran across the river.”

Up on the bluff above the campground, Michelle Hoopes, a physician assistant in surgery at St. Joseph Hospital and Redwood Memorial Hospital, got word from her sister-in-law that someone was giving chest compressions down at the river. Her husband and son had left minutes earlier to go fishing.

“I immediately, worst case scenario, think my son has drowned,” Hoopes said. “I just started running as fast as I could.”

She ran barefoot, down over hot rocks and sand, tearing up her feet without slowing down.

“It was absolutely horrifying,” she said. “One of the worst minutes of my life to run down there and not know what I was going to find.”

She found a stranger in cardiac arrest, not her son. And she got to work.

Hewitt, who had renewed her CPR certification just three months earlier after a 20-year lapse, confirmed that 911 was called before running to the scene. She had never trained on an AED(automated external defibrillator) in her first certification. This time she had.

“It seemed like it was just a convergence, all in the right time, of several people who knew exactly what to do in the moment,” she said.

What followed was less a coordinated rescue than a spontaneous one — strangers and near-strangers falling into rhythm without anyone calling a meeting.

Abdali had been working compressions since before anyone else arrived. A law enforcement officer who had just finished his EMT training rotated in. O’Shaughnessy called the pace, watching depth and location, counting out loud to keep the team together. Hoopes moved in and out of compressions, calling out the one thing she kept hearing in her head from her own training: don’t stop.

“I just kind of remember shouting that out to everyone,” she said. “‘Don’t stop compressions. Whatever you do, you can save a life by doing compressions.'”

Hoopes’s sister-in-law, watching from a distance, said Hoopes took control of the scene. O’Shaughnessy credited Abdali. Nobody on the ground seemed to notice or care who was leading. They had just found each other.

“We all respected each other and communicated so well,” O’Shaughnessy said, “and it couldn’t have gone any better.”

The problem was the river. The woman was still on the far bank. The paddleboard came off the beach. The team eased her onto it and crossed while keeping compressions going — a maneuver Myers Flat VFD Fire Chief Willo Sernovitz would later call his first CPR on a paddleboard. Hewitt said the current made it tense.

“It was a little nerve-wracking,” she said, “because it was kind of a strong current.”

She still had no pulse when they pulled her onto the bank.

The Department That Came Back

Myers Flat VFD had gone largely dark for years. The rebuilding started before Sernovitz and his wife Ember arrived, but the two have been part of the turnaround for two years now. Sernovitz stepped up as assistant chief, then took over as chief on May 1 of this year. The department now runs 11 active volunteers, a new rescue vehicle, and a 99 percent call response rate. On this call, they were on scene within five to six minutes.

They brought an AED.

After manual CPR for nearly 20 minutes, the AED found what it was looking for.

“The AED was able to analyze her rhythm, shockable rhythm, and deliver the shock,” Hoopes said. “That was the first time we got a pulse. It was absolutely amazing that she survived that.”

They shocked her, rotating compressions among bystanders and fire crew. When a pulse finally held, her breathing was still too weak to rely on, so they kept breathing for her manually with a bag-valve mask and loaded her onto a backboard. Ten people carried her up the hill, still giving her air through the mask, until a City Ambulance that had driven all the way from Eureka pulled in.

“We got blessed with bystanders,” Sernovitz said. “One was like an ER doctor, a cop who just had finished his EMT training, an ER nurse and another guy that was a doctor. All these people who didn’t know each other at all were all camping at the RV park.”

Sernovitz rode in the ambulance to Jerold Phelps Community Hospital in Garberville, holding the woman’s hand, talking to her the whole way.

“She started to kind of come to,” he said. “I told her, ‘Squeeze my hand.’ She squeezed my hand really tight.”

In the emergency room, staff switched her from a bag-valve mask to a non-rebreather mask. Then she pulled the mask away from her face.

“She said, ‘Thank you,'” Sernovitz said. “This lady was going cold blue and dead when we got there, and now she’s talking to me, saying thank you in the ER. It was pretty freaking amazing.”

The ER doctor high-fived Sernovitz and the Cal Fire firefighter who had made the ride with them.

“That was like the ‘we won the lottery, man,'” Sernovitz said. “Not that I don’t need the money, but it was better than winning the lottery. It felt so, so great.”

Chase had stayed in contact with the family in the days after. The woman’s mother reached out with a long, glowing message of thanks.

“She did not have a pulse for over 20 minutes, but they stayed on her with that CPR, and I totally think that is exactly what saved her,” Chase said.

The family is asking for privacy but supports recognition of everyone who helped. The woman’s condition is listed as stable.

What the Numbers Say

Nationwide, survival to hospital discharge for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest patients who received bystander CPR runs about 13 percent, compared to 7.6 percent for those who did not, according to the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation’s analysis of 2024 CARES registry data. The American Heart Association puts the overall out-of-hospital survival rate at around 10 percent; some studies place it as high as 17 percent depending on the population and the quality of the response.

The odds are bad under any measure…and they get worse with distance. In rural Southern Humboldt, an ambulance can take an hour or more to arrive. What changed the equation at the campground was the chain: compressions started immediately, a volunteer fire department with an AED on scene within minutes, trained medical providers rotating in to keep CPR quality high.

“From the point where I walked up and saw what was going on to the point that the ambulance showed up, it was probably a good 20 minutes,” Abdali said. “And to have someone who, for lack of other terms, has been dead for 20 minutes, and to bring them back — and by the time they get on the ambulance they’re already saying some words and talking — it’s very gratifying.”

None of the medical providers knew each other outside the campground. Abdali is a hospitalist. O’Shaughnessy works in med-surg and case management. Hoopes is in surgical services. All three work under the Providence umbrella, which includes St. Joseph Hospital and Redwood Memorial Hospital, but they had not come together. They had just all, independently, fallen in love with the same RV park on the South Fork of the Eel River.

The Emotional Toll

Back at the campground, the people who had just saved a woman’s life went back to their campsites. The ambulance was gone. The equipment was gone. There was no debrief, no all-clear, no one to tell them how it ended. They had come together as strangers around a shared emergency, and now they were just campers again, sitting with everything they had just seen and done.

Hoopes thanked the others before they dispersed. It was about all anyone managed.

O’Shaughnessy said the adrenaline carried her through but left her with no soft landing. She didn’t sleep that night. She has a therapy appointment booked.

“It’s almost like in your brain you close that door and you open your door to your family and kids who have no medical background,” she said.

Hoopes said the memory of running barefoot toward what she thought was her drowned son hasn’t left her.

“I really struggled and continue to struggle,” she said. “I was nauseous, I mean I was physically ill afterwards.”

Hewitt said the experience validated every instinct that sent her back to get recertified. She had a message for anyone sitting on the fence, especially those whose training lapsed years ago.

“As my instructor said, ‘I would rather break someone’s ribs than have them die,'” she recalled. Her instructor had also told the class that women are roughly twice as likely to die in a cardiac emergency because bystanders are afraid to touch their chest. “If you can get certified, it’s just a bonus,” Hewitt said. “If you see a need, jump in and do it.”

Hoopes agreed: “Compressions save lives, and you don’t have to do rescue breaths. Just jump in and start doing compressions as well as you can.”

That part is worth underscoring. Current American Heart Association guidelines encourage untrained bystanders to perform hands-only, compression-only CPR — no rescue breaths required. Those guidelines have been updated several times since 2010, meaning anyone whose certification lapsed before then may be working from a different playbook.

Myers Flat Is Where It’s At

Sernovitz came back to the campground after the hospital. He found the people who had been strangers a few hours before and gave each of them a Myers Flat VFD patch. The patches are normally reserved for firefighters.

The department is fundraising for a Lucas 3 mechanical CPR device, which Sernovitz said can push survival odds to around 32 percent. Myers Flat would be the first department in Southern Humboldt to have one. His longer goal is to get a unit into every rural department in the hills — places where people wait a long time for an ambulance and where every minute counts.

For Chase, the weekend was a reminder of what the park is actually about — not just the river, or the redwoods, or the warm weather tucked below the fog line, but the people who keep coming back.

“We become a community,” she said, “and I think it really just stood out that particular day — the goodness that we have in each other. I just don’t think we see it enough in our daily lives, but it was definitely on display here.”

For Sernovitz, it was the call that makes the weight of all the others worth carrying.

“We get some kind of hard calls, and lately we’ve had some …hard calls,” he said. “They’re hard to go home to, and this one just makes everything… it just makes our soul shine.”

Myers Flat is where it’s at. Turns out the bumper sticker was right all along.

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If you would like to donate to Myers Flat Fire, you can send a check to:

MYERS FLAT FIRE
PO Box 131
Myers Flat, CA 95554

Or by Venmo @myersflatfire

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*Note: This section was edited after publication for additional clarity.