Man Is Rescued After Six Days in Houston Manhole, Officials Say

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/us/houston-manhole-rescue.html

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Elmer Espinosa and his road repair crew were working on a Houston highway around 2 a.m. Monday when they heard a disembodied cry for help coming from the side of the road.

Mr. Espinosa, 47, and the other workers paused, looking around to see where the voice was coming from. The men began searching, brushing aside the knee-high growth on the roadside, as the voice called out to them, “I am here, I am here.”

After several minutes, Mr. Espinosa, using the light from his cellphone, spotted an uncovered manhole. When he looked inside the manhole, which was just under three feet in diameter, the upturned face of a man came into view, peering up at him from about a dozen feet down.

“We see all the way down,” Mr. Espinosa said in an interview Monday. “He told me, ‘What day is today?’”

When Mr. Espinosa replied, the man answered, “Please hurry, I got six days inside this hole!”

The ordeal, next to the South Sam Houston Parkway in southwest Houston, was reported early Monday by local television stations, including ABC 13, which have extensively chronicled the chaos in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey last month.

As the storm’s floodwaters and damaging winds swept through Houston, manhole covers were flagged as one of many potential hazards, either by spewing water into inundated roadways or by posing a danger if they are jarred out of place.

It was not immediately clear how the man, whose name and age were not released, fell through the manhole and into the pit. Alanna Reed, a spokeswoman for Houston Public Works, said he was in a manhole that fed into underground sewer lines carrying residential wastewater.

“Manhole covers get stolen from time to time, but we can’t say what happened to this particular one,” she said, speculating that it might have come off during the storm. She said that public works crews had replaced about 65 manhole covers that were reported missing since the storm, or from Aug. 25 through Monday, and had driven through city streets to find missing manhole covers on their own.

Manhole covers sometimes shoot into the air when water pressure builds up in drainage lines during a storm, she said.

Mr. Espinosa said that the man asked for something to eat, and he tossed him snacks from his lunch and bottles of water until rescuers from the Houston Fire Department arrived. Around 2:30 a.m., they lowered a ladder deep into the pit to where the man sat, but he was unable to climb out, the department said.

They then set up a tripod, and a rescuer entered the manhole in a harness, eventually hauling the man to the surface. The man, who possibly had a broken foot, was taken to a hospital, Sheldra Brigham, a Fire Department spokeswoman, said in a text message.

The Fire Department said in a statement that it had notified the Public Works Department of several manholes nearby that were missing their covers.

Mr. Espinosa said that before the rescuers arrived, he spoke briefly with the man as they waited.

“It was nighttime and deep,” he said. “Looking all the way down to the bottom, it was a little bit of water circulating all the way down, dirty.”

The man wept. “He was repeating, ‘Please don’t leave me here,’” Mr. Espinosa said.