It was on Tuesday, October 15, that an unidentified man fell into a 30-foot-deep well in Catonsville, Maryland, after supposedly stepping on a ground patch that gave away. He spent a day trapped in the well before the fire department rescued him on October 16. While he was injured as a result of the fall, none of them were life-threatening.
The man's ultimate rescue was prompted by his neighbors hearing his cries for help. "I was going to get my dogs in from the backyard, and I heard some dude calling for help, so I didn't know what to do," said Wesley Straffin, one of the man's neighbors to WBAL. "So I went downstairs and grabbed my dad, and we went in the backyard to, like, look around, see if we could hear anything."
"We started to call out hello, hello, because we couldn't tell where it was coming from," continued Straffin. "And he started replying. He said, 'Help, help. Hello.' And it turns out it was our neighbor right behind us who had fallen into a well."
Both Straffin and his dad discovered the man trapped inside the well, and they quickly provided help by giving him water. With the well being 30-foot-deep, they had to call 911 to help them rescue the man before anything else happened.
Trapped For A Day
Later, the man would tell the Baltimore County Fire Department (BCFD) that he fell around 4 p.m. the previous day. The man told them how the day went dark and he saw the sun come back out again.
Straffin hypothesizes that the well probably wasn't as obviously seen as others, which may have caused the man's fall. "I don't think he knew it was there," he said, "Looked like the ground just gave way. It was about a two and a half foot wide hole."
Eventually, authorities arrived at the well and helped the man out of the well. A BCFD representative named Travis Francis spoke with PEOPLE Magazine and told them that one rescuer went down the well by using a hoist system of one of the BCFD's ladder trucks.
"Thank God it could have been a lot worse," said Straffin. The man, while injured, didn't suffer any life-threatening injuries and he was transported to University of Maryland Medical Center Shock Trauma. "I'm thankful that we heard him and that help arrived as fast as it did."
