Near-miss tragedy after 5-y-o falls into manhole at school
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A Manchester family is breathing a sigh of relief after their five-year-old child escaped serious injuries following a fall into a manhole at the New Forest Primary and Infant school in the parish on Monday.
“I could have lost my child. Honestly, I could have,” the child's mother, Stacey-Ann Sinclair told The Gleaner.
She said the incident happened after school while her daughter, Jayana Clarke was waiting on the bus to take her home.
According to Sinclair, Jayana told her that she went outside to the back of the school where the manhole is located.
“She (Jayana) said she stepped on it two times and then it just tilt,” she recalled.
But she said that explanation left her confused as she could not understand how the weight of her small child was able to veer a manhole, which is the vertical access shaft leading to an underground utility space, and is typically covered by a heavy metal, concrete, or plastic lid.
“To me it look like it never cover properly because it have a weight. Jayana one couldn’t tek up it, she alone couldn’t manage to tek it up because it have a weight. So I don’t know if someone else go there, shift it away, and then when she go there and she step on it, it tilt. I don’t know, but somehow she fall in it,” she stated.
She said her daughter sunk into the manhole before resurfacing and clinging to the edge.
A teacher, who noticed what was happening, quickly came to her aid, and pulled her out. The child was later bathed, her hair washed, and she was given a change of clothes.
However, the mother is expressing frustration that no effort was made by the school to seek immediate medical attention for her daughter.
“There are so many vehicles at the school; one of the teachers could have taken her to the doctor,” she said.
Clarke said she took her daughter to the doctor the same evening, and the child was given a clean bill of health and told that “she will pass it out”.
She said her daughter has experienced diarrhea and vomiting from Tuesday night into yesterday morning.
“She (Jayana) keeps talking about it, she don’t stop talk about it,” Clarke said, adding that her daughter has also lost her appetite.
The Gutters Cane resident noted too that the school administrators have been in constant contact with her since the incident.
“I thank God, and I give that teacher so much thanks from the bottom of my heart that she was able to help her because, if she wasn’t around there, she (Jayana) would be dead.”
Describing the near-tragedy as a “mystery” , Sharon Anderson, the principal of New Forest Primary and Infant School, said the manhole at the infant department of the school was covered, and that this was the first incident of this nature to have occurred since it was constructed more than 10 years ago.
“Up to now we can't find out how that child got into that manhole,” she told The Gleaner. “An infant child cannot lift that lid off it.”
She added: “We don't know how it opened. She said she jumped on it, and it was covered, and she don't know how she got into it. So, all we know, we don't know…an adult jumped on it yesterday and said they can’t understand.”
She said the manhole carries water from the area where children wash their hands to the pit.
But noting the seriousness of the incident, Anderson said the school has since engaged contractors to provide a solution that will prevent a recurrence.
“We have called two contractors to use some cement and to just seal it in completely so that the lid cannot be taken up. So that is what we're doing,” she said.