Locals deserve all credit

Local people pulled out a 4-year-old boy from an abandoned deep tubewell minutes after rescuers called off their 23-hour long unyielding search. Rescue operations by Bangladesh Fire Service and Civil Defence personnel started on Friday afternoon after ‘Jihad’ had fallen into the 600 feet deep pipe in Shahjahanpur Railway Colony in Dhaka. After a frantic but futile overnight drive to trace the child and lift him out from the bottom of the 14-inch-diametre pipe, firefighters postponed the operation at about 8:00am on Saturday. They started a new operation 2 hours later (around 10am) to find the child and rescue him from the old pipe of the railway pump house dead or alive. However, around 2:30pm, Fire Service’s Director General Ali Ahmed Khan announced the end of their fresh operation as a camera sent down the pipe had not picked up signs of anyone below. As the firefighter were packing their equipment and gear and preparing to leave the Shahjahanpur Railway pump house after abandoning the 2nd drive, locals continued their rescue bid and successfully lifted out the boy several minutes after the fire brigade men left the spot. Khan claimed that local people had been trying different methods to bring the boy trapped in the pipe up and that fire service officials were assisting them. One of the locals, Shah Mohammad Abdul Moon said they had sent a manual cable TV camera binding it with an iron rope to rescue Jihad. Abdul Majid, an electrician working with the locals, said they had tried the technique on Friday night as well without success. ‘We succeeded today after trying for an hour,’ he said. But the ‘success’ turned out to be an embarrassment for the firefighters. ‘We're really embarrassed,’ a senior Fire Service official said. ‘We've been discussing the matter among ourselves,’ he added, wishing not to be named, according to a news agency.