Woman rescued after lying upside down between rocks for 7 hours after trying to retrieve her phone

On October 22, 2024By Yukito

A woman who was trying to retrieve her lost phone from among boulders in Australia’s Hunter Valley became stuck upside down for seven hours before she was rescued earlier this month.

Photos of the incident posted on social media on Monday by the New South Wales (NSW) Ambulance Service show only the bare soles of the woman’s feet.

The woman was walking with friends on private property in Laguna, a rural town in the Hunter Valley about 120 kilometers (75 miles) from Sydney, when she dropped her phone.

When she tried to retrieve it, she slipped face-first into a 10-foot crack between two large boulders, so deep that her friends were unable to reach her. Emergency services have not formally released the woman’s name, but New South Wales State Police said she was 23 years old.

An Australian woman tried to grab her lost phone between boulders and got stuck upside down for seven hours before she was rescued.

Peter Watts, an emergency medical specialist with NSW Ambulance, told CNN there was no phone reception in the area so friends had to leave her to call for help.

On the morning of October 12, he was one of the first on the scene.

“My first thought was: How are we going to get her out of here? Because I’ve never seen anything like this,” he told CNN.

“In our paramedic training, we covered trench rescue, confined space rescue, and vertical rescue, and it was kind of a combination of all those things in one job.”

When Watts and others arrived at the scene, they saw only the woman’s feet between a 10-centimeter (4-inch) crack in the rocks.

“When she crawled into that little hole, she slipped and slid about ten feet down the chute and got stuck,” Watts said.

The place where she fell was about 50 meters (164 ft) down an overgrown bush path inaccessible even to off-road vehicles.

“We all pulled together and figured the only way to get her out was to go vertical, which means we had to remove these rocks,” Watts said.

A delicate rescue operation

For the next seven hours, police, ambulance, fire and volunteer rescue teams worked to free her.

Rescuers advised her to stay still – they feared that if she moved, she might slide further into the hole, making it even more difficult to reach.

Removing the surrounding rocks without having to dig deeper was already difficult enough.

“We were afraid that every time we moved the rock, if it fell in the wrong direction, it would fall on her,” Watts said.

He added that six large boulders had to be removed before rescuers could get close enough to physically touch her feet.

“She was so calm and composed throughout the entire situation. I was very impressed. I would go crazy. She didn’t panic at all,” Watts said.

Sometimes, however, it seemed to fall silent, he added.

They were concerned that she had been upside down for so long and was probably suffering from excess pressure on her limbs.

It took several hours before enough rock was removed for rescuers to gain access to one foot and then the other.

Watts said the last remaining boulder – weighing about 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) – proved difficult to move.

“We used a winch to get it out of the way. We used wood on both sides to keep it from rocking or rolling through that little 10-centimeter gap until we got it out of the way,” Watts said.

They then began manipulating her body to get her out of the hole.

“The slope she slid down didn’t go straight down, so we couldn’t pull her straight up,” Watts said.

She had to form an “S” shape by moving her legs first to one side, then to the other.

“Once we got her hips out, we had to move her legs back to the left side to get her arm out. So it was quite a maneuver to get her all out of this little place. chink.”

After her release, around 4:30 p.m. that day, Watts stated she was “100% relieved.”

“She was tired and dizzy. All the blood was in her head and there was nothing in her legs, so at that stage she couldn’t stand, she couldn’t walk,” he said.

Miraculously, she escaped with only minor scratches and bruises.

The woman was taken to hospital for observation. However, her phone remains trapped between the rocks.