The 19-month-old girl fell into a 13-metre deep well while playing nearby, in Tak district, near the Myanmar border, on Monday afternoon has been rescued in a night operation, after a distress call from the girl’s parents, who were working in a nearby field.
Officials said the girl was taken to hospital and treated for minor injuries. “The child is showing signs of exhaustion, but her signs of life are good,” local police chief Ratsaran Kitsuesing, reports Al-Rai daily quoting AFP.
The girl, said to be the daughter of two immigrants from Myanmar, fell through a 30-centimetre-wide hole in the upper part of the well.
The girl’s parents said that they took her with them to their place of work on a farm in the Khairi Rat area, and that they left her to play under a tree.
But they panicked when they couldn’t find her during the break, and they heard screams coming from the nearby well.
Rescue teams had to work through the night with a mechanical digger, digging a 10-meter-deep hole adjacent to the wellhead.
Oxygen was pumped into the well to enable the child to breathe. Pictures at the site showed rescue workers wearing protective hats working at the bottom of a deep pit.
But the authorities told local media that they feared the well would collapse and harm the child if the teams continued using the digger, so they replaced it with hand picks to remove the last few meters of the earth.
And state television in Thailand stated that rescue workers arrived at the child, at about 08:00 am on Tuesday local time (01:00 GMT), but they were unable to take her out immediately, as it appears that she had suffered an injury in her leg.
But cheers erupted shortly thereafter from the gathered rescue workers, who finally managed to pull the little girl out of the well.
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