Firefighters in Estacada rescued a woman they said was trapped in a septic tank possibly for two to three days. They said she had to be flown to the hospital.
Rescuers said they found her lying in raw sewage with her face just above it in a tank outside her rural home, which is about five miles northeast of Estacada. Officials said she lives there alone.
"It can be definitely a scary situation, especially sitting at the bottom of a septic tank and you don't know that anybody's coming to get you," Nick Wettlaufer, an engineer/paramedic, told a KATU reporter Thursday. Many homes in rural areas use underground septic tanks as a kind of private sewer to process and treat waste.
"Nobody would've heard her up there," said Richard Anderson, a division chief for Estacada Rural Fire District No. 69, which responded to the incident. "The next closest house was a couple of thousand feet away."