"According to Ithaca Fire Department statistics, Lowe was the fifteenth person to die in Ithaca's gorges since 2000—and the fourth to drown in that particular pool since 1986. When most people think of gorge deaths, they think of the jumpers who have given Cornell an unwanted (and unwarranted) reputation as a suicide hot spot. But Ithaca Police Officer Doug Hoyt estimates that about half of those fifteen deaths were accidents caused by turbulent water, slippery rocks, fallen trees, and a host of other natural features. The local community has mourned each death. But Lowe's passing—coming in the wake of the drowning the previous year of Jeevan Mykoo, a thirty-year-old tourist from Ottawa, and the 2006 death of Navin Parthasarathy, a visiting graduate student from the University of California, Santa Barbara—has spurred a widespread debate about how to deal with the dangers and appeals of one of Cornell's great natural attractions."
http://cornellalumnimagazine.com/index.php?option=com_conten...