Totalán, Spain: The search for a toddler who fell down a well in Spain in a tragedy that has gripped the country ran into problems yesterday as rescuers raced against time to find the boy alive.
Julen Rosello, who is two, fell down a very narrow shaft more than 100m deep on Sunday while playing as his parents had lunch nearby in the town of Totalan near Malaga, family members said.
“We’re putting all our efforts in going as fast as possible but I want you to know there are huge difficulties,” Angel Garcia Vidal, the engineer co-ordinating the work, said on the fifth day of rescue operations.
He added that under normal circumstances, the type of excavation work being carried out to try to get Julen out would take “months.”
Rescuers are for now unable to get to where they believe the child is as a layer of earth, sand and stones believed to have been dragged down by Julen when he fell have blocked the well.
The toddler is believed to be underneath and the discovery of several strands of his hair by rescuers appears to confirm that theory.
But no one knows if Julen is still alive.
Garcia said there was ventilation in at least the upper half of the well. “Beyond the blockage there may be some or not,” he added.
We’re “dead, but with the hope an angel will help us get him out alive,” Julen’s father Jose said on Wednesday.
“It feels like it’s lasted for months.”
The rescue operation is unprecedented in Spain given how difficult it is.
Rescuers are digging two tunnels, one parallel to the well and another at an angle further underground aiming to reach Julen.
But the work is complicated by the state of the soil.
Engineer Juan Lopez said that the vertical tunnel was progressing “for the moment without too many problems.”
But the horizontal one is causing “problems,” he added. Excavating that tunnel “within less than two days is really complicated,” he said.