A 26-year-old woman has been rescued from a mine shaft in north-west NSW after spending a harrowing two nights trapped underground.
Cynthia Charty was reported missing from her home in Lightning Ridge on Saturday, after going for a late night walk on Friday night and tumbling into the eight-metre hole.
The Lightning Ridge area is pockmarked with mines thanks to their opal industry, which made the search and rescue efforts difficult. Even worse, temperatures in the area clocked 41C during the two days Charty was trapped, and her family feared for her life.
Her mother told reporters, “I was very fearful that something bad had happened. I had a gut feeling that she’d either fallen down a mine or she’d been bitten by a snake. It was horrible for two days not knowing where she was or what happened to her.“
Eventually a police drone found Charty at 10:20am on Sunday, and rescue workers were able to hoist her out of the mine. Remarkably, she only had to be treated for minor abrasions and a blood nose.
Apparently, it was actually the mine that kept her safe during those scorching two days, according to Inspector David Checkley:
The issue with mines is that they’re quite cool down there so she was actually shivering the first night she was down there because the temperatures are only about 22C.
She’s very lucky that she was down there and not in the sun. It may have been a different situation.
Her family are calling it a Christmas miracle, and we’re certainly glad that she’s managed to come out of her two days as the central character of a Hardy Boys novel relatively unscathed.
