A 37-year-old woman was found trapped underneath a rundown Melbourne home on Saturday night, after neighbours reported hearing calls for help coming from the property.
Metropolitan Fire Brigade Commander Roger Chitty said the woman was “extremely dehydrated and incoherent” when they rescued her, after spending two hours creating a hole in the kitchen floor.
“We weren’t able to make conversation with her,” Commander Chitty said, as reported by The Age.
“But she was very fortunate to be conscious and in the state she was in, considering how long she’d been under the house.”
Though rescue crews were guessing the woman had been trapped for around four days, a neighbour says it’s more likely to have been a week.
“Last Sunday, about midday, I saw this lady coming up the street looking in, and then she went down the laneway,” neighbour, Janis, told Fairfax Media.
“She pulled a couple [of fence palings] off, they were lying near that shed. I assumed she was trying to get in.”
Janis says it’s “definitely” the same woman who was found.
“The firefighter said she’d been there for four days, and I said, ‘Mate, she’s probably been there since Sunday because that’s when I saw her’.”
The woman is now recovering in hospital.
