Russian rescue workers are preparing to use a robot to recover the body of a one-and-a-half-year baby that fell into a city sewer at the weekend after the pavement collapsed.
The apparently freak accident occurred in Bryansk 235 miles south-west of Moscow as 26-year-old Tatyana Didenko was strolling across the city’s central square with her baby boy, Kirill, in a pram.
In a scenario that sounds like it comes from a horror film, the pavement beneath their feet unexpectedly caved in, plunging the mother and child into a deep hole that was reportedly caused by a ruptured sewage pipe below.
Ms Didenko managed to somehow cling on to the edge of the hole but her baby, Kirill, was knocked out of his pram and swept away into the city’s sewers by a strong underground current.
Rescue workers have recovered items of the baby’s clothing in pipes several miles from the accident scene but have yet to find the baby’s body. The tragedy occurred on Sunday afternoon and hopes that the baby will be found alive were practically nil, rescuers said.
Nikolai Denin, the governor of Bryansk region, has speculated that unusually changeable air temperatures may have caused the pipe below the pavement to crack, while investigators have opened a criminal case into the incident, believing that officials responsible for maintaining the 1970s-era sewage facility may be guilty of gross negligence.
Online news portal lifenews.ru quoted some witnesses claiming that police who arrived on the scene were afraid to approach the hole for fear of further collapses in the pavement, losing valuable rescue time.
Much of Russia’s Soviet-era infrastructure has been poorly maintained since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and reports of pavements and sometimes even entire road sections collapsing are not uncommon.
