The search for a 5-year-old boy who fell into a well gets underway in Lixian county, Hebei province, on Tuesday.(Quan Yi/For China Daily)
The search for a 5-year-old boy, who has been trapped in a dry well since Sunday morning, is underway in a village in Lixian county, Hebei province, a local government official said.
The boy, Zhao Zicong, accidentally fell into the well, about 40 meters deep and 35 cm wide, while he was playing with his older sister, according to a report by Yanzhao Evening News.
A rescue team have sent oxygen into the well, and used more than 60 excavators and other rescue vehicles to excavate the land around the well.
As the well was too small for members of the rescue team to enter, their only choice was to dig the land around it and try to reach the boy, Beijing News reported.
Life detection equipment found no signs of life, but the team did find a toy 37 meters deep inside the well, which the boy's father said belongs to his son, said Xu Jingdong, a publicity official in Lixian.
A steel cylinder with a diameter of 3 meters was fitted around the well and workers began digging the earth inside the cylinder, with every meter taking about two hours to dig, according to a report by cnr.cn.
There were still about 6.3 meters to be dug at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, according to Beijing News.
The boy's father said he was working on farmland nearby when the accident happened in Mengchang village. He said the well, used for irrigation, was abandoned and should have been covered, adding that the cover might have been removed by villagers working in their fields.
