OAK ISLAND, N.C. — Hours after a teenage girl suffered severe injuries in a shark attack Sunday a teenage boy was also severely injured.
WECT-6 (http://bit.ly/1IdIpaN) reports that Oak Island Mayor Betty Wallace said the female victim lost part of her arm and could lose her left leg. She is not from Oak Island but was visiting family, the mayor said.
Wallace said in a phone interview Sunday that she didn’t have further information on the girl’s prospects for recovery.
Brunswick County Dispatchers said that they received the call at 4:12 p.m. and several agencies responded to the scene including Oak Island Police and the Air Link Helicopter.
The second incident was reported at 5:30 Sunday. Wallace said the 16-year-old boy lost an arm and was airlifted to a hospital.
Further details weren’t immediately available about either of the teens.
The Oak Island town manager sent an ATV to get everyone out of the water, the mayor said, adding that the Brunswick County Sheriff’s office was going to send a helicopter up and down the coast to patrol.
Steve Bouser and his wife were at the beach, and just beginning a week’s long vacation, when he said people began yelling, “Come in! Get out of the water! Get out of the water!”
“I saw someone carry this girl (out of the water) and people were swarming around and trying to help,” he told The Associated Press Sunday evening. “It was quite terrible.”
There was a lot of blood he said and that people were trying to apply makeshift tourniquets to stop the bleeding. He added that people were asking her questions to try to keep her conscious. It was “quite nightmarish,” he said.
“It was so much like a scene from Jaws,” his wife Brenda added, he said.
