Emergency personnel from two counties were dispatched to a river rescue Wednesday night near Parryville.

Parryville Fire Chief Mike Kunkle said the department received a call at around 6:30 p.m. for a situation at the Parryville Dam.

“A random caller reported that they saw a kayak in the dam and that it was partially submerged and there was other personal belongings that were floating along with it,” Kunkle said. “We set up a search and we had fire department personnel up along the (Parryville) dam itself looking to see if there was anybody that may have looked to get out of it, swam to shore.”

Kunkle said they expanded the search and had people along the Lehigh River from Parryville to Slatington looking to see if they could find anything.

“One of our officers that was going along the dam area saw some pedestrians that were walking along the dam and they said they were looking for their kayak and seen it slide off of their property into the water,” he said. “They actually had a picture of the kayak, and I got a copy of that picture and I took it to the original caller to verify that’s what he had seen, and he verified that’s the kayak he had seen; at that point, that’s when we called off the search.”

Kunkle said also assisting at the scene were the Bowmanstown Fire Department and Diamond Fire Company in Walnutport.

“The swift-moving water definitely had an impact on it, everything was moving real fast; that’s why we got Walnutport involved and they actually did an analysis of the river flow to try to estimate the time of the call and where it could possibly be,” he said. “With the flow of the river, we immediately tried to get people down stream, with the speed of the river.”

Kunkle said they were on scene for about an hour, though he added they never did find the kayak.