If you damage your phone, as opposed to completely loosing it, the sim card is almost never damaged.

So changing phones can be done without any customer support or web forms or calls to service provider etc.

Actually, every phone I ever had eventually got replaced this way, I am still using the original sim card from years ago.

I should have clarified that he dropped the phone in the river AND he did not attempt to get it back from the river, thus the SIM card is considered lost as well :)