Vietnam rescuers still working to recover boy’s body from shaft
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Jan 9 (EFE).- Rescue teams continued working on Monday to recover the body of a boy who fell into a 35-meter-deep shaft of a concrete pile at a construction site in southern Vietnam.
Ten-year-old Thai Ly Hao Nam fell into the 25-centimeter-diameter hole on New Year’s Eve and Dong Thap provincial authorities confirmed last Wednesday that he had died.
Vietnamese experts, with the help of a Japanese team, are still looking for a way to extract the pile in complicated terrain due to the proximity of a river and without the necessary machinery to speed up the operation.
According to Than Nien newspaper, the latest plan involves inserting a steel cylinder around the pile to a depth of 24 meters, removing the earth from around it and hooking the pile to facilitate its removal with hydraulic machinery.
Despite the time that has elapsed since the accident, authorities are also not sure where the boy, who weighed just 20 kilos, was trapped inside the pillar.
The security cameras of the construction company captured the moment in which the boy suddenly disappeared down the hole while he was walking on uneven terrain at the bridge construction site where he had gone with three friends to look for scrap metal.
After the accident, witnesses said that they heard him call for help for 10 minutes, but there had been no reports of communication from him since then.
Some 350 rescuers, including police officers and firefighters, have attended the scene in order to rescue the boy. EFE
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