Brisbane, Australia –
A woman who tried to retrieve her lost phone from between boulders in Australia’s Hunter Valley became stuck upside down for seven hours before she was rescued earlier this month.
Just the bare soles of the woman’s feet can be seen in photos of the incident posted on social media Monday by the New South Wales (NSW) Ambulance service.
The woman had been walking with friends on a private property in Laguna, a country town in the Hunter Valley about 120 kilometres (75 miles) from Sydney, when she dropped her phone.
As she tried to retrieve it, she slipped face-first into a 3-metre (about 10 feet) crevice between two large boulders, so deep that her friends were unable to reach her. The woman’s name wasn’t formally released by rescue services but NSW Police said she was 23 years old.
NSW Ambulance specialist rescue paramedic Peter Watts told CNN there was no phone signal in the area, so her friends had to leave her to phone for help.
He was among the first on the scene on the morning of October 12.
“My initial thought was, how are we going to get her out of here? Because I’ve never come across this,” he told CNN.
“In our ambulance rescue training, we’d cover some trench rescue, confined space rescue and vertical rescue, and it was sort of an amalgamation of all those things in the one job.”
When Watts and others arrived, all they could see were the woman’s feet between a 10-centimetre (4-inch) gap in the rocks.
“As she’s crawled into this little hole, she slipped and slid about three metres down a chute and got stuck,” Watts said.
The area where she fell was about 50 metres (164 feet) down an overgrown bush track that was inaccessible even with off-road vehicles.
Rescuers had to remove several large boulders to get close enough to her feet to pull her out.
“We all put our heads together and determined the only way to get her out is to come out vertically, which means we have to remove these rocks,” Watts said.
A delicate rescue operation
For the next seven hours, police, ambulance, fire and volunteer rescue crews worked to free her.
Rescuers advised her to stay still – they were worried that if she moved she could slip further down the hole, making her even harder to reach.
It was already difficult enough to remove surrounding rocks without having to dig any deeper.
“We were concerned that anytime we moved a rock, if it fell in the wrong direction, it was going to fall down on top of her,” Watts said.
Six large boulders had to be removed before rescuers could get close enough to physically touch her feet, he said.
“She was so calm and collected through the whole thing. I was very impressed. I would have been frantic. She was not panicked whatsoever,” said Watts.
However, at times, she seemed to go quiet, he said.
They were concerned about her being upside down for so long and possibly suffering from the effects of excess pressure on her limbs.
It took a few hours before enough rock was removed for rescuers to first access one foot, then the other.
The last remaining boulder – weighing some 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) – proved difficult to shift, Watts said.
“We used a winch to pull that out of the way. We were using timber on either side of that to prevent that from rocking or rolling over that little 10-centimetre gap until we got it well out of the way,” said Watts.
Then they started to manipulate her body to get her out of the hole.
“The chute that she slid down didn’t go straight down, so we couldn’t pull her straight up,” Watts said.
She had to form an ‘S’ shape, with her legs to one side, then the other.
The rescue effort involved multiple emergency teams from police, fire and ambulance services.
“Once we got her hips out, then we had to move her legs back around to the left-hand side to get her shoulder out. So, it was a bit of a bit of a maneuver to get all of her out of that little crevice.”
Once freed, at around 4:30 p.m. that day, Watts said she was “100% relieved.”
“She was tired, and she was quite dizzy. All of her blood was in her head, and she had nothing in her legs, so she couldn’t stand, couldn’t really walk at that stage,” he said.
Miraculously, she escaped with only minor scratches and bruising.
The woman was taken to the hospital for observation. Her phone, however, remains trapped between the rocks.