A 10-year-old boy who fell into the narrow open shaft of a concrete pile at a construction site on New Year’s Eve in Dong Thap’s Thanh Bình district has been declared dead by Vietnamese Police.
The local emergency service team had been putting every effort to rescue Ly Hao Nam who fell into a 25 centimeters wide and 35-meter-long support pillar driven into the ground and has been trapped there. Authorities are unsure where exactly in the pillar the boy was stuck.
Despite around 350 rescuers working for over 100 hours, the Deputy Chairman of the southern province of Dong Thap, Doan Tan Buu, released an official statement saying, “The authorities have determined that the victim has died and are trying to recover his body for the funeral.”
A medical and forensic expert team alongside local authorities concluded that the boy had died based on several factors like the location of the accident, the depth of the pillar, the length of rescue attempts, and possible injuries that he might have suffered.
The child was heard crying out for help for over 10 minutes after falling into the hollow concrete pile on Saturday when he and his friends had been searching for iron scraps.
However, the boy did not respond on Monday as the authorities attempted to lower a camera down to the hole to locate him, Thairath reported.
Mr. Pham Minh Chinh, the Vietnamese Prime Minister, had also encouraged rescuers and local authorities to mobilize all necessary equipment and efforts to save the boy’s life.
No one expected the boy to be trapped so deeply in the pole, said the rescuers as its area is no larger than the width of an adult’s hand.
Le Hoang Bao, director of the Dong Thap Department of Transport, said that authorities are looking into possible safety violations even though the construction site was fenced with warning signs put up around it.
