Vietnam: After four days in a deep concrete pipe – boy declared dead – panorama

For almost 100 hours, emergency services and helpers had tried to free ten-year-old Hao Nam. He fell into a 35 meter deep concrete pipe at a construction site in the Vietnamese province of Đồng Tháp on Saturday. The rescue attempts were very complex. The pipe, which was only about 25 centimeters wide inside, was to be pulled out of the ground. That was not successful until the end. The provincial administration declared the boy’s death.

Hạo Nam had probably collected discarded items on the construction site that were still usable, she writes newspaper VNExpress. How he could fall into the narrow hole remains unclear. It’s hard to imagine that a boy could fit in there and then fall so low, “because the space is only as wide as an adult’s hand,” said one of the helpers at the construction site, who tried to keep the child safe until the end save. VNExpress writes that Nam initially called for help. For ten minutes, the calls slowly died down.

On Tuesday it was already unclear whether Hao Nam was still alive. The emergency services would have pumped oxygen into the pipe regularly. However, it could not be determined whether the ten-year-old was actually still breathing. A camera was lowered on Wednesday afternoon: no sign of life. In the evening, 18:31 local time, says the vice chairman of the provincial administration the Vietnamese journalists then: A team of doctors, coroners and local authorities had come to the conclusion that the boy could not be alive. The boy’s father had previously been allowed to go to the scene. The family of the injured child is now receiving help from the government.

First, helpers tried to soften the earth around the pipe, which was closed at the bottom, in order to pull it out of the ground with a crane. On Monday, the military got involved, sent special engineers and elite soldiers and came up with a new plan: A steel pipe with a diameter of one and a half meters was placed around the concrete pipe so that the latter could be pulled out.

Then the exact position of the boy should be determined with a detector in order to be able to cut open the concrete. But it never came to that. Until the end, the emergency services failed to pull the pipe completely out of the ground. According to VNExpress the provincial administration admitted that a lack of technical equipment and experience made the rescue operation even more difficult.

On the night of Friday, the boy’s body was to be removed from the pipe so that his family could bury him promptly.

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