Woman attacked by shark at Coogee beach wakes briefly from coma to say three words
A woman attacked by a shark at Sydney’s Coogee beach has uttered her first words after waking from a coma 10 days after sustaining her injuries.
“I love you,” Leah Stewart told her mother and partner after coming out of a coma on Tuesday. She was bitten by a great white shark on 13 June.
Stewart has had five days of surgeries – including an arm amputation – with more to come, her brother Josh Stewart wrote on a fundraising page.
“After a week of life-support and repeat surgeries, doctors were able to extubate Leah and reduce her level of sedation to bring her out of the induced coma for a short period of time,” he wrote.
“Her first thoughts were with her daughter … and wanted to check she was OK.
“This is a lot faster than anyone expected, and for us this feels like a miracle and is everything so many of us have hoped and prayed for over the past week.”
Stewart, a 34-year-old teacher who is a mother to a one-year-old girl, remained in intensive care.
A fundraiser page set up to fund her medical procedures and aid her family had garnered more than $488,000 in donations.
While she remained in hospital, tensions regarding sharks off Sydney’s coast were running high.
A drone video circulating on social media showed what appeared to be a shark close to shore at Bondi beach early on Wednesday morning. The operator said it was a great white, and one had also been spotted on Tuesday.
The beach was closed by lifeguards, the New South Wales Shark Smart app posted at 9am on Wednesday.
“This is not an uncommon occurrence at this time of year, and users of the Shark Smart app will have noticed the increasing detections of white sharks on our tagged shark listening stations,” NSW’s department of primary industries (DPI) said in a statement.
“White sharks are present over a wide range of sea surface temperatures from 10-27C, with data from our tagged sharks indicating that most juvenile white sharks move northward along the NSW coast in late autumn and early winter, with more juvenile white sharks travelling along the NSW coastline from September to November, when the waters are cooler in northern NSW and southern Queensland.”
The DPI separately confirmed a tiger shark was detected at Bondi on Tuesday afternoon, having been tagged at Maroubra earlier that day. Bondi was also briefly closed on Sunday due to a shark sighting, according to Shark Smart.
‘We should be world-leading’
Stewart’s attack reignited calls to cull shark populations to protect swimmers, but the NSW premier, Chris Minns, has said great whites could not be targeted as the species was protected.
The premier on Wednesday said NSW would be rolling out “world-leading” shark drones across more of the state’s beaches.
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“We’ll be using technology that’s available, but hasn’t been rolled out at scale anywhere in the world, not in California, not in Florida, [nor South Africa] … places where you’ve got developed world economies, large tourism populations and sharks,” Minns said. “We’ll be first.”
The premier said there would be an announcement “soon”, including the cost and how Surf Life Saving NSW would operate the system.
The DPI said on Wednesday that one Surf Life Saving drone was “flown at Bondi from 7.30am to 4pm daily”, with another covering Tamarama and Bronte, and a third looking at Coogee and Maroubra beaches.
“We will be making an announcement shortly about additional measures,” the department said.
The Civil Aviation Safety Authority has granted a temporary exemption for aerial surveillance of Coogee beach after the attack on Stewart. The beach is about 8km from Sydney airport.
Shark nets, which are temporarily removed during the winter whale migration season, were due to be reinstalled at the start of September.
‘I wouldn’t swim alone’
Some people have questioned whether this week’s shark sightings could be the same animal.
Marine biologist and shark expert Rob Harcourt said that was “unlikely” given the way sharks move around an area.
“They do spend a lot of time in local areas, but a local area is quite big,” the Macquarie University emeritus professor said. “It would encompass the whole of Sydney. There’s a lot of food around, so there’s probably quite a lot of sharks that are around at this point.”
Harcourt said while he understood “people are nervous about swimming”, he said “the risk of being bitten is not immensely great if you’re at a patrolled beach”.
“I wouldn’t swim alone. You’re less likely to spot an animal that’s coming in, whereas if you’re swimming in a group, there are more eyes in the water. And … you’re more intimidating to the predator,” Harcourt said.
The 65-year-old was among the locals ushered away from the water when lifeguards closed Bondi beach on Wednesday morning.
“The shark alarm went off just as I was getting to the beach. So with my friends, we all went for a walk [instead].”
Harcourt backed efforts to roll out more shark drones as the most cost-effective way of protecting people “without causing any harm to the environment”.
