He screamed for help, but no one heard Chris Cummins, 75, during the five days he was trapped under a pipe. Without food and water, the former mayor of Redbridge, on the outskirts of London, survived the story of a detour that could have killed him.
On the last day of February, Cummins was returning home to Wanstead, in the east of the English capital, when he chose to shorten his path and take a shortcut. He eventually got stuck under a pipe, behind a pavilion of the Redbridge FC football club, without a mobile phone, The Telegraph reports.
To return home more quickly, the former mayor took a shortcut to Barkinside tube station. On this alternate path, Cummins attempted to go through a wire fence and when crawling got stuck under a pipe at the back of Oakside Stadium. And unable to move, he remained there for five days without access to food or water, with temperatures below freezing.
“Laying there, without a cell phone, all I could do was scream and pray for help, sometimes the Our Father, other times I just said, ‘God, please help me get out of here,'” the former president of the Redbridge room to the Daily Mail. “I managed to sleep, and I felt like time passed, because of the noise in the tube station, I heard the announcements hundreds of times,” he recalled to the British newspaper.
Chris Cummins, 75, said he was lucky to be alive after his nightmare at Redbridge FC’s Oakside Stadium when he tried to slip through a fence. https://t.co/qgDmCZFyAw
– ITV News (@itvnews) July 3, 2023
He prayed and cried for help, but to no avail. Only on the fifth day did the nightmare come to an end. Redbridge FC chairman Richard Eaton and three colleagues heard him cry for help. While waiting for the emergency services to arrive, he was immediately given water with a straw.
“I couldn’t hear human voices, and when Ricky finally showed up, I said, ‘Thank God you’re here!'” Cummings said.
“We found Chris in a horrible position, face down in the dirt. I will never forget the moment we found him and the sheer joy in his voice. I remember him asking if I was an angel and the relief on his face was overwhelming for all of us. Emergency services said it was very unlikely he would survive another night.”
He spent two months in hospital, where the toes of his left foot were amputated due to a previously undiagnosed health problem, and now, after recovering in a nursing home, the former mayor can finally go home.
Source: DN
