Boy slips down further as rescuers race against time
CHENNAI:RESCUE operations to pull out the two-year-old boy who fell into a 600 feet open borewell in Tamil Nadu’s Trichy on Friday continued on Saturday evening even as he slipped further from a depth of 25 feet to over 90 feet after the tube-well caved in during the rescue efforts.
Two-year-old Sujith Wilson fell into the borewell, dug up by his father on Friday evening and his neighbours alerted the family upon hearing his cries, said Trichy superintendent of police Zia Ul Haq.
“His father, Britto Arockiaraj, had dug the borewell for agricultural purposes. The child is at a depth of 25 - 30 feet and efforts are on to rescue him. We will bring him out shortly,” Zia Ul Haq had said on Friday.
Six teams have been pressed into the rescue operations that have also seen four failed attempts to lift the toddler using a rope at Nadukattuppatti village near Manaparai town in Trichy district.
An 20-member State Disaster Response Force team and a 30-member National Disaster Response Force team are also present at the site.
The boy is alive and safe as per a medical team on the spot. The boy is being supplied with Oxygen
to aid breathing.
Efforts to dig up a parallel channel next to the borewell did not yield the desired results.
A robotic device from Madurai was requisitioned on Friday and rescue teams from Salem and Namakkal were rushed to Nadukattuppatti, police had said on Friday.
The boy’s mother, Kala Mary, broke into tears while stitching a rescue bag for the rescue teams on Saturday.
Several political leaders have been present at the spot since Friday. State Health and Family Welfare Minister C Vijayabaskar, who has been camping at the site since Friday night, told news agency PTI that all efforts were on to save the child. A parallel borewell was being dug to rescue the child, he added. The efforts would require three to four hours, he noted.
Minister Vellamandi Natarajan was also overseeing the rescue operations.
A two-year-old boy died after he was stuck inside a borewell for nearly 110 hours in Punjab’s Sangrur in June.
Meanwhile, the district administration ordered that all open bore wells in the district be closed. Hundreds of deaths have been reported due to children falling into open borewells in the country.