Woman spends 7 hours wedged between boulders after trying to retrieve phone she dropped
An ambulance service in Australia had to come to the rescue of a woman who “got herself in a spot of bother earlier this month” when she became wedged between two boulders while trying to recover her dropped cell phone. Matilda Campbell slipped into a 10-foot-deep crevice in the region’s Hunter Valley and spent about seven hours stuck between the massive rocks before rescuers finally freed her with just cuts and scrapes, officials said.
The New South Wales Ambulance service shared photos and details of the rescue operation on Monday, explaining that Campbell’s friends dialed the emergency services “after unsuccessful attempts to free her” as she was suspended “hanging by her feet upside down for over an hour.”
A specialist rescue paramedic “worked with a multidisciplinary team to remove several heavy boulders to create a safe access point” to the trapped woman and then the team built a wooden frame “to ensure stability while rescuers worked.”
The team had to use a mechanical winch to move a massive 1,100-pound boulder.
“In my 10 years as a rescue paramedic I had never encountered a job quite like this, it was challenging but incredibly rewarding,” specialist paramedic Peter Watts said, according to the ambulance service’s statement. “Every agency had a role, and we all worked incredibly well together to achieve a good outcome for the patient.”
In her own posts on social media after the incident, Campbell said she was “the most accidental-prone person ever,” and added that she would refrain from exploring rock formations, at least for a while.
“I wanted to give the biggest shoutout to my friends, the team who worked so hard to get me out,” she said in another post, adding that she was “forever thankful” to everyone involved in freeing her from the rocks.
NSW Ambulance noted in its statement that Campbell never did manage to retrieve her phone.
