A four-year-old boy fell into an abandoned narrow well that is at least 500 feet deep at Shahjahan Railway Colony in the capital yesterday.
The child, named Jihad, fell down accidentally while playing with his friends at the colony playground around 3pm yesterday. His playmates notified his family soon after the incident.
On information, three units of fire-fighters rushed to the spot within half an hour and started an operation to rescue the child, said Mehedi Hasan, OC at Shahjahanpur police station.
“According to the locals as well as the fire service experts, the well is at least 500 feet deep,” the OC told the Dhaka Tribune.
The rescue team sent an oxygen cylinder down so that the boy could breathe inside the well, which is a 16-inch wide pipeline with a two-inch pipe inside it, and later, he was given juice and water, according to witnesses. The fire-fighters also sent him a torch light.
Jihad is the youngest among three children of his parents. His father Nasiruddin is a security guard at Motijheel Ideal School and College. The family lives in the colony.
A distressed Nasirullah pleaded with the rescue team to bring his son back up.
“Please bring him up no matter what it takes,” he cried, also asking everyone to pray for his son’s well-being.
The fire-fighters started the rescue operation around 4pm. They started by talking to him, addressing him by his name, and then they sent a rope line down and asked Jihad if he could hold it tightly.
As soon as Jihad got a tight hold of the rope, the fire-fighters started to pull him up. However, after a while, Jihad could not keep holding on to the rope and fell down again.
The rescuers kept talking to the boy to ensure he was alive and sent down the rope again.
Between 4pm and 7:30pm, the firefighters repeatedly tried to bring up the child by using the rope line, but failed every time as he could not hold on to the rope for long enough. After 7:30pm, the fire-fighters sent down a sack and asked Jihad to sit on it.
That plan also failed as the child fell again after being pulled up for a while.
Major Shakil Newaz, chief of the rescue team from the Fire Service and Civil Defence Department, told the Dhaka Tribune that they were frequently having conversations with the child to ensure that he was alive.
“We have sent food and oxygen so that the boy can survive until he is rescued,” he said.
“We are trying to rescue the child by sending down rope and sacks, but he cannot hold on to the rope line or the sacks long enough for us to pull him out as he has grown weak because of the stay inside for so long,” he said.
“We are taking this measure as it is not possible to send someone down the pipe as it is too narrow and nearly 500 feet deep.
“We sent a camera down the well, but it could not find Jihad as it covered only around 400 feet,” the fire chief said.
“So we are trying a new technique and trying to pull up the two-inch wide pipeline inside the 16-inch using a crane to bring out the boy,” he said. “We are trying our best to rescue the child, and we are hopeful that we will succeed.”
Around 11pm, the rescue team was able to pull up narrower pipeline completely, making more space in the 16-inch pipeline.
“This is the first time that we are facing this kind of situation. We have experts here, so we will be able to bring out the child safely after cutting the pipe,” Major Shakil said.
According to locals, the well is an abandoned pipeline for a deep tube well, which was used to supply water to the entire colony; it went out of commission and the pipeline was covered with a metal cap about a year ago.
But recently the metal cap was taken off and a sack was placed to cover the opening, they said.
“As the first well stopped working, Bangladesh Railway authorities decided to install another tube well, and a contractors’ firm named AR Traders won the tender. Jahangir Alam, senior sub-assistant engineer at the railway, was the project supervisor,” Tofazzal Hossain, director general of Bangladesh Railway, told the Dhaka Tribune last night.
“The contractors were working on the new pipeline and opened the old one for the work, but did not follow the necessary precautions, which is why this accident took place,” he said.
Jahangir was suspended around 10:30pm last night, and AR Traders was blacklisted because of this, he said.
In a press briefing at the site around midnight, Director General of Fire Service and Civil Defence Brigadier General Ali Ahmed Khan said specialised teams from LGED and Wasa and experts from Buet were working alongside the fire fighters.
“We are trying to send down a specialised camera brought from Wasa, and we are also working on making a catching device, following the recommendations by Buet experts, to pull out the child,” he said.
In addition, a man named Bashir Uddin Ahmed volunteered to go down into the well around 11:30pm to bring out the child. He took all the preparations to follow through with the plan, but ultimately he was not allowed to go down because the experts wanted to observe the situation down the well through the camera first.
Tasqim A Khan, executive director of Wasa, said: “It is a matter of great pride that Bashir volunteered to go down in order to rescue the kid. But we cannot allow a life to be put at risk in order to save another.”
Around 1am, the rescue team sent down the Wasa specialised camera in the well to observe the situation inside.
When this report was filed at 1:30am, the camera had yet to find any trace of the child.
State Minister for Home Affairs Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal and Dhaka Metropolitan Police Commissioner Benazir Ahmed visited the spot and directed the rescue team to give their maximum efforts to bring the child out safely.