Little Nam didn’t make it. The 10-year-old Vietnamese boy, trapped for 4 days in a 35-metre deep well near a construction site in the Mekong Delta province, was pronounced dead by local authorities. Rescuers spent nearly 100 hours trying to free him, but to no avail. “Authorities have determined that the boy is dead and are trying to recover the body,” said the vice president of the southern province of Dong Thap, Doan Tan Bu.
In Vietnam, a race against time had begun to save the child. The accident occurred on New Year’s Eve: little Thai Ly Hao Nam was near a bridge construction site in the Mekong Delta province, where he was looking for scrap metal with friends, when he fell into a pipeline of concrete just 25cm wide and 35 meters deep. Immediately after slipping inside, the little boy screamed desperately for help and rescuers intervened almost immediately, but already on Monday the emergency teams no longer received any sign of life despite having pumped oxygen into the well to help the boy breathe.
With the help of special equipment, rescuers continued for days trying to loosen the earth around the pipeline so that it could be hauled up with a crane. Unfortunately without arriving on time. A team of local doctors came to the conclusion that the little boy died due to various factors. The crash site, the depth of the crater, the duration of the rescue operations and the possible injuries sustained during the fall were fatal.