Two-and-a-half year Tamil Nadu kid dies after 8 hours in borewell

Vellore: In yet another bore well tragedy, a two-and-a-half year old boy died after falling 20 feet into a deep bore well at Koorambadi village near Arcot on Sunday. The fire service and National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) personnel, along with a team that brought a special rescue machine from Madurai, battled for over eight hours to pull out Tamilarasan from the bore well shortly after 5 pm and rushed him to the Walajah general hospital only to be told that the child was dead for at least two hours.

“Shock and asphyxiation could be the main cause for the death”, a police official said quoting a GH doctor.

He said Tamilarasan’s family lived at Thambithiyapuram near Arcot. His father Kutty was away working in the Gulf and his mother Geetha had taken the kid along to visit her brother Madhavan’s house at nearby Koorambadi village a couple of days ago. On Sunday morning, the boy went out to play in the adjacent farm and fell into a bore well that Madhavan and his father Kanagasabai had sunk sometime back and abandoned as it did not yield water. They had covered the bore well opening with tyres and obviously the boy had slipped through that. He screamed as he fell into the bore well.

Though the bore well was 300 ft deep, the boy was caught at a depth of 20 ft. The family found him screaming with his hands stretched above. The police and revenue officials were alerted and teams of rescuers arrived soon afterwards. Collector R. Nandagopal and SP Senthil Kumari, along with senior officials, supervised the rescue operation, watched by several villagers and the anxious family.