Culture

A 13-Year-Old Kid Was Just Rescued After Spending 12 Hours Lost In The Sewers

The sanitation manager told reporters that "this young man rose like Jesus".

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A 13-year-old kid was just rescued after spending twelve hours floating through the Los Angeles sewer system, in a harrowing ordeal that’s basically the plot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles minus the anthropomorphic warrior turtles.

Jesse Hernandez was reportedly at an Easter picnic in the park with his family, playing with some other kids on wooden planks when one gave way and sent him hurtling eight metres down into the sewers. The stream of filth was moving pretty fast, and Jesse was quickly swept away.

The other kids sounded the alarm, the parents called 911, and floating cameras were sent into the sewers to search for Jesse. With every passing hour, the odds of finding him decreased. And yet, twelve hours in, the cameras spotted some handprints on the sewer pipes, and rescuers opened a nearby manhole to hear Jesse crying “help!”.

As the sanitation worker who found him put it in a call to police, “once I pulled the lid off the manhole cover he was just like right there”. The workers quickly lowered a hose into the pipe, and used it to pull Jesse up to safety.

Keeping with the Easter theme, sanitation manager Bryant Jones told the LA Times that “this young man rose like Jesus”.

“He was happy, the family was happy,” said Adel Hagekhalil, another sanitation department manager told reporters, and yeah, we can imagine.

Here’s hoping no other kids have to spend twelve hours sailing along an underground river of literal shit any time soon.