Authorities have revealed how a five-year-old girl fell overboard on a Disney cruise, prompting a dramatic ocean rescue by her father.
As the Disney Dream sailed toward Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at 11.30 a.m. on Sunday, the young girl was sitting on the fourth-deck railing while her parents played shuffleboard nearby.
The family had completed a four-night voyage through the Bahamas aboard the $900 million cruise when disaster struck and the girl slipped backwards, plunging 45ft into the ocean.
Initially, it was not clear what had led to the girl’s fall. Now the Broward County Sheriff’s Office has confirmed that the child had lost her balance and tumbled through a porthole, CBS Miami reports.
The dad leapt from the cruise to save his daughter, treading water for up to 20 minutes before both were pulled aboard the ship’s rescue boat.
“This family is so blessed,” a sheriff’s spokesperson said, keeping the family’s identity anonymous. “It’s great to be able to respond to good news rather than what could have been a tragic outcome.”
Passenger Monica Shannon told CBS the railings had “little divots and spaces” that made it possible for the girl to climb up. Shannon was on the third-floor deck at the time, one below where the girl plunged from.
“I kind of see something really fast flew by, I didn’t think anything of it,” she said. “I just figured it was maybe a part of the show or just the experience, but about five minutes later we heard that someone flew overboard.”
Another passenger named Chandler previously told People magazine about the moment the girl hit the water.
“It sounded like hitting the pavement,” she said. “Then this awful scream from what I assume is the mother and then this massive splash.”
Chandler said she was with her family when the commotion began, and “Mr. M.O.B.,” meaning man overboard, blared out over the ship’s intercom as it traveled between Nassau and Grand Bahama Island. The passenger said she didn’t think rescuers would be able to locate the dad and daughter and told her nine-year-old daughter Harper that “they were probably gone.”
Video shared online shows the yellow rescue boat quickly bobbing through the waters to reach the father and daughter as onlookers watched from on top of the ship.
One clip shared on TikTok shows the girl in the boat wrapped in a towel while being embraced by a rescue worker. In another, the girl’s sodden father could be seen breathlessly clutching onto a rescuer.
Travelers erupted into rapturous applause as the rescue teams threw out a rope for the pair to grab onto and safely pulled them onto the jetty.
