On Tuesday evening, around 6 p.m. five 11- and 12-year-old boys entered the sewer drain in the West Brighton section of Staten Island for fun. What happened next was not so much fun according to FDNY officials: they got lost and disoriented in the tunnel.
The storm drain is located near Martling Avenue and Clove Road. The kids said they walked through a cemetery and then went down into the sewer system. They were crawling around in there for about fifteen minutes with only one cell phone for light. They called 911 to be rescued.
In the 911 recording, dispatchers prompted the kids with questions to try and figure out their location.
“What’s the address in Staten Island?” the dispatcher says at the call's beginning.
The child on the phone answers, “We don’t know … we’re stuck in the sewer.”
The dispatcher asked again: “You’re stuck where?”
“In the sewer,” the boy replies.
“It’s like a tunnel where all the pipes are,” one of the boys says.
The dispatcher instructed the boys to yell so the emergency responders could hear them and locate the boys. NYPD ESU and FDNY responded and rescued all five of the boys.
"They were nervous. I think they got to the point where they were nervous if they were ever going to find their way out," said FDNY firefighter John Loennecker to ABC 7.
“We might have hands on the kids right now,” someone on a radio can be heard saying on the 911 call. “We have all five children removed from the sewer. EMS is assessing them as we speak.”
All of the kids along with one firefighter were transported to Richmond University Medical Center. No injuries were reported, officials said.
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