An afternoon of kids playing in the rain turned into a frantic scene Tuesday as more than 40 emergency responders from a half dozen agencies descended on a subdivision here where an 11-year-old boy went missing, apparently sucked into a culvert in a drainage ditch following torrential rains that flooded the streets and swelled the nearby retention pond.
For 40 minutes the boy was gone.
Neighbors along Dusty Drive gathered, growing increasingly panicked as the minutes went by.
Then Wesley Pompa, a deputy fire chief with the Harrison Fire Department, and a colleague spotted something beautiful as they came upon a manhole cover about 30 feet from where the boy had last been seen.
It was a finger poking through the manhole cover's small hole.
“We got there around 6 and were told at that point he was sucked down the drain,” Pompa said. “We searched the immediate area, but didn’t find the manhole cover because it was underwater.”
Then the manhole cover — and the finger — came into view.
They ran to get tools to pry it open. When the cover was lifted, the boy — the Calumet County Sheriff's Department has not released his name — was standing on the ladder, his head above the water.