A young boy who disappeared from the beach at Indiana Dunes State Park (IDSP) was one of four missing persons whom the Porter Fire Department was tasked with searching for this past weekend.

All four were eventually found safe, Fire Chief Lewis Craig told the Chesterton Tribune today.

At 6:52 p.m. Saturday, Craig said, the PFD was dispatched to IDSP after a 5-year-old boy was reported missing by his family.

The boy was subsequently found something like a mile west of the IDSP beach, at Dune Acres beach. “He was missing for about half an hour,” Craig said. The PFD cleared the scene at 7:08 p.m.

Then, early Sunday afternoon, at 2:13 p.m., the PFD was dispatched again to IDSP to provide assistance to EMS personnel treating a 34-year-old man suffering a possible heart attack. While at the scene, another report was made of a missing lost child, Craig said. That child also went west but only as far as Porter Beach, where the child was found safe.

The weekend began for the PFD with a different sort of search, this one in Beverly Shores, where at 12:26 a.m. Saturday National Park Service rangers received a report of a possibly suicidal woman in the area. The PFD mustered with its trained tracker dog but was unable to find any trace of the woman along the beach, Craig said. Then a report was made by a homeowner of an attempted break-in, firefighters and NPS rangers responded to the residence, and another dog was found at scene. As it happens, that second dog belongs to the woman in question and searchers followed it to the woman, who was discovered naked hiding under a log. She was transported to hospital for observation.

A fourth person was reported missing at 10:32 p.m. Saturday, this one a 11-year-old boy believed to have fallen over the railing by the daylighted Dunes Creek at IDSP. Firefighters responded to the scene but were unable to find him in the water, Craig said. Turns out, the boy had extricated himself and made his way back to camp, where firefighters determined that he had fallen but was uninjured. The PFD cleared the scene at 10:55 p.m.

Posted 7/9/2012