A Boat Explosion on Lake Michigan and a Heroic Rescue

Tonia Logan: Tubing is a summer tradition here on Lake Michigan. In July, my cousin, Cindy, and I took her daughter and six other kids out tubing on my pontoon boat. We had just returned to shore with a happy bunch of 13-year-olds.

Cindy Owen: Then Tonia heard a little boom, and I noticed smoke way out on the water.

Tonia: Nobody else was around. We hadn’t seen another boat all day. I told the kids to get back into the boat, and we quickly headed out there as I called 911.

Cindy: It was like a scary movie. The smoke was getting thicker, and as we got closer, we saw a burning Chris-Craft boat — and two men in the water. Tonia was driving, and she went into girl-boss mode, getting us as close to the men as possible without putting us too close to their boat.

Tonia: The guys were floating on a piece of board. We could tell they were injured — definitely with serious burns and in a ton of pain.

Cindy: One guy was moaning in the water. The other had a faraway look in his eyes.

Tonia: I knew that they would need the ladder to climb into our boat, but we had four inner tubes tied up back there. Cindy’s daughter, Ella, got rope ready to throw to the men, and her friends Nora and Evelyn moved the tubes out of the way of the ladder.

Cindy: The kids were quick and efficient without needing our help. I was so proud of them.

Tonia: We couldn’t physically assist the men because of their burns. It would have hurt them for us to touch them. We made space and offered them towels and water. They were definitely in shock. One of them asked me to take him back to the parking lot, and he kept looking for his phone and keys.

Cindy Owen, Tonia Logan and the kids saw smoke coming from across the lake and headed toward it while Logan called 911. They found the men floating in the water with severe burns.

Courtesy Tonia Logan

Cindy: They didn’t know what had happened. They told us they’d just filled their boat’s tank with 40 gallons of gas but something had gone wrong with their engine. We later learned that they’d been drifting with the engine off, and when they went to turn on the ignition, they immediately saw flames and heard an explosion. They must have been thrown off the boat by the blast, because one of them told me they had to swim back to grab their life preservers.

Tonia: Police and paramedics met us on shore and rushed the men to the hospital. It surprised me that people started calling us heroes. We did what I hope anyone else would have done, which is help someone in need.

Cindy: The older I get, the more I understand that life depends on our generosity to others. If our actions demonstrated that to the kids that day, then I’d say there was a higher purpose for us being there.

Tonia: The kids won’t forget this experience. None of us will. Younger me didn’t always know this, but I do now: Even when something’s hard, scary or uncomfortable, doing the right thing can have a profound impact on you and the people around you.

Tonia Logan, 48, who works for Home Depot, and Cindy Owen, 55, a kindergarten teacher, live in Sugar Grove, Illinois. The two men they rescued, a man in his 40s from Washington State and a man in his 50s from Illinois, were treated at the hospital and released. Their names were not made public. The cause of the boat’s explosion was likely improper ventilation of the engine compartment.