SAN ANTONIO – One visitor to the River Walk downtown was determined to find her phone, which fell out of her grasp and into the San Antonio River.
“Yeah,” the visitor said to another person in the video. “I’m going to feel around with my feet.” So, she took a dip.
A viewer shared their video of the visitor’s voyage into the San Antonio River with KSAT. While it is unclear when the video was recorded, the viewer also posted it to their TikTok account on Nov. 14.
The visitor had already taken her shoes off before she stepped down from a walkway and into the river. While she made gradual steps in the river, some visitors looked on, perhaps curious if the visitor’s attempt to find her phone would be a successful one.
“I’m gonna be famous on TikTok,” the visitor said to onlookers nearly two minutes into the two-minute, 16-second video.
Watch the video below:
According to the viewer, the visitor searched the San Antonio River for approximately six more minutes. She found two rocks and a brick in the river, but she did not find her phone.
The viewer’s video now has more than 1 million views, more than 15,000 shares and nearly 3,000 comments on TikTok.
Despite the visitor’s eagerness to find the device, authorities have said the San Antonio River isn’t the cleanest water for a human to be around.
“The reason why there’s more of the concern as far as pollutants go is because there are elevated levels of bacteria, mostly E. coli bacteria, largely, in downtown San Antonio,” San Antonio River Authority (SARA) Manager of Environmental Sciences Shaun Donovan told KSAT Explains in July 2022.
According to SARA, the E. coli in the river largely originates from excrement.
At the time, KSAT also asked Donovan what would happen if someone fell into the San Antonio River.
“You’re not going to get sick,” Donovan said. “You know, if you jump in the river and you take a few gulps of water, things might not be as good, but you’re not going to get sick just from falling in the River Walk.”
In addition to waste, the San Antonio River also accumulates plenty of trash.
South Central Texas, which is prone to flash floods, also causes trash to flow and accumulate even faster when water rises rapidly.
“Normally we’re seeing about 10 or 15 CFS (cubic feet per second) in the San Antonio River on any normal given day,” SARA Watershed and Park Operations Manager Tommy Mitchell told KSAT Explains in 2024. “And we’ll see that rise very rapidly up to 2,000 CFS.”
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