LOS ANGELES, Calif. (CNN/KCAL) – Some people in Los Angeles are calling it an Easter miracle. A 13-year-old boy was rescued after falling into the city’s underground sewage system.
The boy spent an entire night fighting for his life in sewage pipes.
It was the call rescuers had been waiting for all night: “Male. Conscious, breathing, 13-years-old.”
13-year-old Jesse Hernandez was found alive.
It had been a harrowing 13 hours for firefighters & sanitation workers as the clock was ticking to find him.
Hernandez had fallen down a 3-foot hole while playing with friends on top of this abandoned sewage maintenance building in Griffith Park Sunday afternoon.
An unidentified rescuer said, “Every hour that went by is a diminishing window of survivability.”
Video was shown from inside the sewage pipes that authorities say Hernandez was trapped in. a pipe that’s barely 4 feet wide and at times filled with toxic wastewater rushing past at 15 mph.
Specialized cameras attached to buoys were used to search through the hundreds of feet of pipe until authorities narrowed down his location.
Adel Hagekhalil with the Los Angeles Sanitation Department said, “We were able to see on one of the video cameras some hand markings on the sewer itself.”
Then early Monday morning, a group of sanitation workers lifted the hatch of an 11-foot chamber. It’s in a small patch of dirt right along the 134 where it meets the 5 freeway. Hagekhalil said, “Opened it and the person heard ‘help!'”
Those same workers used the hose from their truck to reel him up.
“I think the guys would’ve jumped in to rescue him, they would do anything to rescue that kid,” Hagekhalil said.
One of the workers gave him a cell phone to call his family who reunited with him at the hospital.
Officials are now investigating how Jesse fell into the pipe in the first place. They’re also working to make that spot more secure.
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