Man dies from fumes after trying to save son

Family mourns Joe Dober, who jumped into a gas-filled shaft to rescue his son

By Nancy Townsley

The Forest Grove News-Times, Dec 17, 2009

Courtesy photo / News-Times

Joe Dober (left) lost his life trying to rescue his son Jon (right) from a manhole on the family’s land Dec. 12.

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It should have been just a routine task before a holiday outing.

Eight members of Forest Grove’s extended Dober family had breakfast together Saturday morning and were heading out to get a Christmas tree when fate intervened.

Joe Dober, 40, his girlfriend Jassandra Lee, his youngest son Jon, his parents, his sister Molly and two nephews took a detour to the family’s rural property off Northwest Timmerman Road to grab a load of firewood before going on to a local tree farm.

It would only take a few minutes, Joe reasoned. But as it turned out, he lost his life that day.

Everything went wrong when he decided to turn a valve in an underground shaft on the forested property around 10:50 a.m. in order to allow an adjacent pond to fill with water during the winter and spring months.

The Dober brothers, Joe and Tom, along with their father, John, had been working to transform a portion of the acreage into a gathering place for family barbecues and birthdays.

“Joe really wanted to fill the pond,” Molly Dober, recalled Tuesday morning.

He lifted the cover off the manhole and used a long wrench to try and tighten the valve from above the ground, but it didn’t work. Someone had to go down into the hole.

A dozen times

Joe and others had been down there a dozen times, Molly said, but that morning her brother was reluctant to shimmy down the ladder to the bottom of the hole.

His 16-year-old son Jon, a wiry Forest Grove High School sophomore, volunteered. He scrambled down the 10-foot-deep shaft to close the valve, but quickly got into trouble.

“As soon as he got down there we knew something wasn’t right,” said Molly, the third of John and Marilyn Dober’s four children. “There was this look on his face.”

As Jon started climbing back up the ladder, his father stretched his arm out to grasp his hand. Suddenly Jon crumpled, blacked out and fell back into the hole.

Joe reacted immediately.

“Joe instantly went in after him,” said Tom Dober, Joe’s youngest sibling. But he wasn’t three feet down the shaft before he passed out and collapsed on top of Jon.

Family members called 9-1-1 and, while waiting for rescue workers, shoved pieces of PVC pipe down the hole and frantically blew air toward Joe and Jon.

“We had two pipes going to Jon and two going toward Joe,” Tom Dober said Tuesday. “Everyone was blowing as hard as they could to get some oxygen down there.”

Jon came to, but Joe did not.

“He was screaming, ‘Am I going to die? Is my dad dead?’,” Tom Dober said. “At that point we knew he was conscious, but he was still trapped.”

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