The tragic demise of a five-year-old Moroccan boy Rayan who fell into a deep well in the first week of February has brought back the focus on several such rescue efforts worldwide. Close on its heels, the Indian army rescued an injured trekker stranded without food and water for nearly 48 hours in the cleft of a steep hill in the Indian state of Kerala, this month. Some rescue efforts have been successful, but many others ended up with disastrous results.
In the case of the Moroccan boy, the emergency workers found the boy dead at the bottom of a well on February 6 in a tragic end to a painstaking five-day rescue operation.
Rayan had fallen into a narrow, 105-feet-deep well in the village of Ighran on Tuesday, February 1. He survived the initial fall, and the rescuers desperately dug a parallel tunnel to save him. Their Herculean efforts gripped Morocco, and the world, for more than four days. But by the time they reached him on Saturday and pulled him out from the well, he had died.
rescue mission in pictures
We look at some of the outstanding efforts by rescue teams to save precious lives in recent times:
Boy dies after imitating Rayan incident
Soon after Ryan’s death, another tragic case was reported in Morocco. A five-year-old boy died after throwing himself into a deep well in Sabt Al Ghaba near Tifelt town in northwestern Morocco, apparently influenced by the reports of Rayan’s case. The boy flung himself into a 57-metre deep well on the day of the funeral of Rayan. Local authorities retrieved the boy’s body four hours after his fall.
Stranded Kerala trekker rescued
Mountaineers from the Indian army have rescued an injured trekker stranded without food and water for nearly 48 hours in the cleft of a steep hill in the southern Indian state of Kerala. R Babu, 23, slipped and fell into the crevice on Monday, 7th February 2022 while hiking with three friends.
The 1,000-feet (305 metre) Kurumbachi hill in Palakkad district of Kerala is known for its steep terrain, and the state’s forest department had previously warned trekkers about the risk of hiking up the hill. Reports said that when Babu fell and got stuck in the cleft on Monday, he had only enough space to sit inside it. The injured trekker was seen sitting in a tiny crevice for nearly 48 hours. After his friends failed to pull him up using sticks and ropes, they went down the hill to seek help from the police. Babu sent photos and selfies of the spot to help them locate him.
As rescue efforts expanded, drones were used to monitor his location on the side of the hill where he was stuck. Though coast guard and navy choppers started the search operations on Tuesday, they failed to locate him due to the rugged terrain. Rescue teams were also unable to pass food and water to him. Later, the government sought Indian army’s help, and its teams were airlifted and deployed at the hill range, and eventually rescued him.
• Meanwhile, on October 25, 2019, a two-year-old boy Sujith Wilson who fell into a well while playing outside his house in Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India, died during the rescue mission. The 82-hour-long rescue operations went viral across the country. However, on Tuesday, October 29th, officials confirmed the boy’s death. Initially, the child was struck at a depth of about 30 feet but subsequently slipped further down, officials said. The body was finally pulled out from a depth of 88 feet.
• In another incident in July 2006, Prince, a six-year-old boy from Haryana’s Kurukshetra district, was trapped in a 60-feet borewell, which had a diameter of 16 inches. He was rescued after over two days of efforts, which was telecast live on almost all television channels.
• In 2009, Kirtan Pranami, an 11-year-old boy from Palanpur in Gujarat, India, died after falling into a 100-feet deep borewell. Within months, a two-year-old Darawath Mahesh who fell into a 35-feet borewell in Warangal in Andhra Pradesh and died, while, a five-year-old child who fell into a 250-feet deep borewell in Jaipur in 2009 was saved. Four-year-old Anju Gujjar was also rescued from a 50-feet deep open borewell in Rajasthan in the same year.
Tragic death of miners in Meghalaya
In July 2021, the administration of Indian state of Meghalaya called off its search for five miners trapped in a flooded coal mine in the state’s East Jaintia Hills district, 39 days after the incident. The rat-hole mine at Umpleng, about 20 km from Khliehriat, the headquarters of the district, was flooded, trapping five migrant workers, four from Assam and one from Tripura - after a dynamite explosion on May 30.
Six co-workers of the trapped miners escaped the tragedy as they were outside the mine at the time of the incident and were escorted to their homes. In 2018, a similar accident occurred at Lumthari in the same district, about 20 km away from the coal mine at Umpleng. Hazardous rat-hole coal mining was not legally permitted in Meghalaya after the NGT banned it in 2014.
Thailand cave rescue mission
In 2018, a junior association football team was rescued from the Tham Luang Nang Non cave in Chiang Rai Province in northern Thailand. The boys, ranging in age from 11 to 16, and their coach, 25, set out to explore the cave system on June 23, but they became trapped after heavy rains quickly flooded passages. Divers finally located them on July 2, allowing emergency crews to send them food and supplies and an air tube was deployed to the cave to make sure that they had enough oxygen to breathe.
Eventually, the rescue team escorted the trapped out of the cave on stretchers guided by expert divers, one by one. The complex, three-day operation saw four boys emerged on July 8, four on July 9, and the final four boys plus their coach on July 10. On July 18, they were released from the hospital and have been cleared to return to their families.
Indian sailor saved
In 2018, after four days of a tense rescue operation involving four nations, Indian sailor Navy Commander Abhilash Tomy was found and dramatically rescued. As per reports, Tomy had set sail in the Golden Globe Race 2018, which requires a sailor to solo circumnavigate the globe.
His boat Thuriya was hit by a deadly storm in Indian Ocean, about 1,900 nautical miles from Perth. After his boat was struck down, the 39-year-old Kerala sailor sent out distress messages from his vessel on Saturday, September 22. The Indian Navy and Australian defence forces set about on the mission to rescue him. Traced by the Indian Navy Reconnaissance aircraft, Tomy was rescued by French vessel Osiris on Monday.
Zhuhai tunnel tragedy
In July 2014, fourteen construction workers died in a flooded highway tunnel in China’s Guangdong province. The incident occurred when the workers were reported to have been trapped in a waterlogged tunnel section of an under-construction highway in Zhuhai city. The Shijingshan tunnel was then a section of an expressway under construction that passes beneath a reservoir in the Guangdong province city close to Hong Kong and Macao. The rescue effort involved divers, remote-controlled submarines and other high-tech equipments while workers on the surface rushed to pump out water from the tunnel.
Remarkable rescue mission of Chilean miners
In October, 2010, a spectacular rescue of 33 miners trapped for two months in Chile’s far-flung Atacama desert made headlines worldwide. The miners were stuck behind 770,000 tons of rock. They had spent a record 69 days in the hot, humid bowels of the collapsed mine. For the first 17 days, they were all believed to be dead. Rescuers had found the men miraculously alive with a borehole the width of a grapefruit. It served as a lifeline to pass hydration gels, water and food, as well as letters from their families to keep their spirits up.
Three separate drilling rig teams, Chilean government departments, the NASA, and a dozen corporations worldwide, cooperated well to complete the rescue mission. Engineers deployed the escape capsule “Phoenix” after boring the shaft down to the miners and reinforcing it with metal casing to prevent rocks from falling and blocking it. On October 13, 2010 the men were lifted to the surface one at a time, in a specially built capsule, as an estimated 5.3 million people watched via video stream worldwide.
Some other recent rescue operations
Firefighters rescue teens from icy death
A training session on water rescues turned real for US firefighters in suburban St. Louis when the crews sprang into action to save two teenagers. Maryland Heights Fire Protection District crews were wrapping up training on Tuesday, February 10, 2022 on Creve Coeur Lake when they spotted two people running across it, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. As they watched, the ice covering the lake broke and the pair fell through. The training firefighters and Pattonville and Creve Coeur firefighters quickly scrambled to pull the two teens to safety from the icy lake within minutes.
3-year-old boy found after being lost for three days in woods
February 11, 2022: A 3-year-old boy wearing a sweat shirt and diapers was found sitting in a creek and cupping water in his hands to drink on Monday, three days after he was lost in rugged Australian woodland. Hundreds of people had been searching for Anthony “AJ” Elfalak, who has autism and is non-verbal, since he went missing from his family’s remote rural property near the village of Putty, north of Sydney. The crew of a police helicopter spotted him sitting in shallow water in a creek bed late Monday morning about 470 metres from his home.
Missing man found in bush after 18 days
January 24, 2022: A man who went missing more than two weeks ago in Australian bushland was found alive, apparently surviving his ordeal by “drinking dam water and eating mushrooms.”
On Sunday morning, Robert Weber, 58, was discovered near a dam by a local property owner after last being seen on January 6, leaving a hotel in Kilkivan, about 200 kilometres north of Brisbane.
Queensland police said early indications suggested Weber had run into trouble after his car became bogged down on an unfamiliar road. Rescuers earlier suspended an air-and-ground search after failing to find a trace of him despite a week of combing “dense bushland, rivers, dams and steep terrain during wet conditions”.
- With inputs from agencies
