Fire and emergency service personnel rescued a farmer who got stuck in a pipeline which he had crawled into to connect a water pipe to his land at Singribovidoddi village in Ramanagaram on Sunday.
It took personnel around two hours to rescue Govindaraju Rajanna.
Mr. Rajanna owned land on either side of a bypass road that had been built as part of the ongoing work on the expressway between Bengaluru and Mysuru. According to officials, water-linking pipelines had been laid on Mr. Rajanna’s land. However, to get the water, Mr. Rajanna entered the pipeline at around 11 a.m. and crawled about 200 feet before he got wedged in a heap of mud.
His son Venugopal, who was monitoring his father’s movements from outside, realised something was amiss, and called the control room for help.
The rescue team rushed to the spot and managed to contact Mr. Rajanna to ascertain his exact location. “He was finding it difficult to breathe and arrangements were made to supply oxygen into the pipeline. It was not possible for our men to enter the pipeline to pull him out, so we had to break it open with the help of an earthmover,” said a police official.
After breaking the pipeline, they were able to get closer to Mr. Rajanna. Personnel dug out the mud and finally rescued him. The entire village that had set up camp at the spot cheered when the farmer finally emerged from the pipe.
