If you were hiking in the Australian wilderness, along an overgrown and mostly inaccessible bush track and stopped for a photo only to drop your phone into a crevice, how far would you go to retrieve it?
A 23-year-old Newcastle woman faced such a predicament earlier this month. She ended up falling into the hole, becoming trapped and left in an entirely new predicament that required an hours-long rescue process.
“We were all like, ‘How did she get down there and how are we going to get her out?’” New South Wales ambulance specialist rescue paramedic Peter Watts told ABC News Australia.
Down under a rock
Accompanied by friends, the woman, identified as Matilda Campbell, was exploring private property in Laguna, a remote area in the Hunter Valley north of Sydney, when she dropped her phone.
During her retrieval attempt, rescuers said she fell three metres head first down a curved chute in between two large boulders leaving her hanging upside down by her feet.
Her friends were unable to get her out and had to leave her behind in search of cell reception to call for help.
When help did arrive an hour later, the “multidisciplinary team” had to figure out how to get Campbell safely extricated.
We were all like, ‘How did she get down there and how are we going to get her out?’
“In our ambulance rescue training, we’d cover some trench rescue, confined space rescue and vertical rescue, and it was sort of an amalgamation of all those things in the one job,” Watts explained to CNN, noting this was first in his years on the job.
They determined the best way out was the way she went in – vertically – but that would require delicately moving surrounding boulders weighing as much as half a ton.
After a few hours of moving the huge rocks and building timber supports to prevent any from rolling onto Campbell, rescuers were able to access her feet and start manipulating her body through the crooked aperture she’d fallen in.
“Once we got her hips out, then we had to move her legs back around to the left-hand side to get her shoulder out,” Watts recounted. “So, it was a bit of a maneuver to get all of her out of that little crevice.”
Throughout the seven-hour ordeal, during which Campbell had to remain still to avoid slipping further down, Watts said she was a “trooper.”
“She was calm, she was collected, anything we asked her to do she was able to do it to help us get her out.”
Her phone, however, never made it out.
Right-side up
Once free of the hole, Campbell, having been upside down for hours, was dizzy and couldn’t stand or walk, but otherwise had suffered only minor scratches and bruises.
A post to her Instagram in the days following the incident includes photos of the injuries and is captioned “how the night started vs the next day when i was stuck for 5 hours between rocks + a fractured vertebrae.”
Over on her Facebook account, she called herself accident-prone, said there would be “no more rock exploration” for a while and thanked her friends and the rescue team.
“I’m forever thankful as most likely I would not be here today. I love you guys and you mean the world to me.”
In a post to the ambulance service’s social channels on Monday, Watts said the rescue “was challenging but incredibly rewarding.”
“Every agency had a role, and we all worked incredibly well together to achieve a good outcome for the patient.”
In response, Campbell wrote, “thank you to the team who saved me you guys are literally life savers…too bad about the phone tho.”
Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.