Images of the rescue of a woman who was trapped upside down between two rocks for about 7 hours are going viral on social media.
The 23-year-old woman was hiking with friends on private property in Laguna, Australia, when she dropped her phone. While trying to retrieve it, she fell headfirst into a 3-meter gap between two rocks, so deep that her friends could not rescue her.
Rescuers from the New South Wales (NSW) Ambulance explained that, since there was no phone signal in the area, her friends had to go elsewhere to call emergency services. Peter Watts told CNN that he was one of the first to arrive at the scene on the day of the incident, which occurred on the morning of October 12.
“My initial thought was, how are we going to get her out of here? Because I had never encountered something like this. In our ambulance rescue training, we cover trench rescues, confined space rescues, and vertical rescues, and this was kind of an amalgamation of all those things in one job,” Watts told the outlet.
The area where she fell was about 50 meters below a bush trail covered in vegetation that was inaccessible even with off-road vehicles. “We all put our heads together and determined that the only way to get her out of there was vertically, which meant we would have to remove these rocks,” he recalled.
The rescue took about seven hours, as police, volunteers, rescuers, and firefighters told her to remain still, fearing that while trying to remove the rocks, she might end up falling even deeper into the hole.
Six large rocks had to be removed before rescuers could get close enough to touch her feet, according to Watts. Only then did they begin manipulating her body to get her out of the hole.
She was freed around 4:30 p.m. that day and felt “100% relieved,” Watts said. “She was tired and quite dizzy. All of her blood was in her head, and she had nothing in her legs, so she couldn’t stand or really walk at that moment.”
Fortunately, she escaped with only minor scratches and bruises. The woman was then taken to the hospital for observation. Her phone, however, remains stuck between the rocks.
Photo and video: Facebook. This content was created with the help of AI and reviewed by the editorial team.
