Woman wedged upside down between rocks for 7 hours after trying to retrieve her phone | CNN


Woman wedged upside down between rocks for 7 hours after trying to retrieve her phone | CNN

Updated 5:10 AM EDT, Tue October 22, 2024 Brisbane, Australia CNN — 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 kilometers (75 miles) from Sydney, when she dropped her phone. As she tried to retrieve it, she slipped face-first into a 3-meter (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-centimeter (4-inch) gap in the rocks. “As she’s crawled into this little hole, she slipped and slid about three meters down a chute and got stuck,” Watts said. The area where she fell was about 50 meters (164 feet) down an overgrown bush track that was inaccessible even with off-road vehicles. “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.