New South Wales Ambulance
The woman slipped into a three-meter crevasse
A young woman spent hours stuck upside down after slipping between two rocks while trying to retrieve her mobile phone while hiking in Australia.
The woman – named Matilda Campbell in reports – was walking in the Hunter Valley region of New South Wales earlier this month when she fell into a three-metre crevasse.
It was the start of a seven-hour ordeal during which emergency services would undertake a “difficult” rescue, including moving several rocks.
And even after successfully winching a 500 kg (1,100 lb) rock, they still had to figure out how to get the woman out of the “S” bend she found herself in.
“In my 10 years as a paramedic I had never encountered a job like this, it was challenging but incredibly rewarding,” said Peter Watts, a paramedic with the Ambulance Service. New South Wales, according to a statement posted on the service's social media channels. pages.
She had already been upside down for more than an hour before help arrived, her friend's first attempts to free her having failed.
Photos shared by the ambulance service show her hanging by her feet between the rocks, along with the complicated efforts to keep the area stable as emergency services tried to create a space large enough to free her.
New South Wales Ambulance
A winch had to be used to move the larger rocks out of the way.
New South Wales Ambulance
Rescuers had to mobilize to get the woman out.
Mr Watts later described the young woman as a “soldier” in an interview with Australian broadcaster ABC.
“We were all wondering: How did you get there – and how are we going to get her out?”
Incredibly, the rescued woman only had minor scratches and bruises, NSW Ambulance said.
However, she was unable to get her phone back.
“Thank you to the team that saved me, you are literally life savers,” she wrote in an online message.
“But too bad about the phone.”
