The Rescue of Baby Jessica

The radio crackled in the cab of my truck just after ten that morning, October 14th, and the dispatcher's voice had a pitch I'd never heard him use before — a child, a well, a backyard on the west side of Midland. I dropped the rig I was working and drove straight there, tires kicking up the reddish caliche dust that gets into everything in this part of Texas, and by the time I pulled up there were already a dozen men standing at the mouth of an eight-inch pipe like they were staring down a gun barrel.

Her name was Jessica McClure. Eighteen months old. She'd been playing in her aunt's yard with some other children when she slipped through the narrow casing of an abandoned well, a pipe barely wider than a coffee can, and dropped twenty-two feet into the black. We could hear her down there, faint, crying for her mother, and every man standing over that hole went quiet at the sound of it, because there is nothing on this earth that stops working men faster than a baby's voice coming up out of solid rock.

The first plan sounded simple enough on paper. Sink a second shaft next to the well, parallel, straight down, then punch a horizontal tunnel sideways to break through to her. Firemen and police worked it out fast, and they called in men like me, oil-field men who knew how to move earth, because Midland runs on drilling and everybody within fifty miles owns a rig or knows somebody who does. We figured hours, not days.

The ground had other ideas. A few feet down, the augers hit rock, hard gray stone that didn't want to give up an inch, and it turned out that pipe was sunk into a shelf of the stuff that ran the whole depth we needed. Our jackhammers, the ones we broke out first, were built to punch downward into a driveway or a foundation, not to bore sideways through bedrock at an angle, and I remember a foreman throwing his gloves down and just standing there, breathing hard, looking at that rock like it had insulted him personally.

By that afternoon the crowd behind the sawhorses had grown from a dozen to what felt like half the county, and more kept coming. Local television trucks parked their dishes on the shoulder of the road. We worked in shifts, drilling, hauling debris in buckets, and every hour that clock ticked, some of the older hands started doing the math out loud on how long a body that small could go without water, and then somebody would tell them to shut up and drill.

It was sometime in the first night that a mining engineer showed up, and things changed under his direction. He knew angles and rock formations the way we knew pipe threads, and he brought word of a newer method, cutting through stone not with a bit but with a jet of water forced through a nozzle at a pressure that could slice like a blade. Waterjet cutting, they called it. I'd heard of it used in factories. Nobody I knew had used it to save a baby's life.

The water hoses screamed all through that second day, a high thin sound that didn't stop, and men rotated in and out of the shaft on ladders, choking a little on rock dust that hung in the pit like fog even with the water running. My shoulders ached in a way I hadn't felt since roughnecking in my twenties, and I wasn't even the one closest to the hole. Somewhere below us, in a space you couldn't have fit a grown man's chest into without turning him sideways, that little girl was still breathing, still crying sometimes, and once — I heard this from a man who'd just come up, and it about broke him telling it — she was singing. Some song about a bear. Winnie the Pooh. Down there in the dark with her leg bent up over her head, she was singing to herself.

A roofer named Ron Short came forward sometime in that stretch and said he'd go down if they'd let him. He'd been born without collarbones, could fold his own shoulders in on themselves to slip through openings the rest of us couldn't dream of fitting through, and for a while the rescue commanders turned the idea over seriously, weighing what a man built like that might manage in a passage barely wider than a stovepipe. In the end it was a paramedic, Robert O'Donnell, slim enough and steady enough, who they decided would go.

Forty-five hours in, we broke through. The cross-tunnel met the well casing, and for the first time since Wednesday morning there was a straight line, however narrow, however jagged with rock, between the surface and that child. I was standing at the top of the shaft when the word came up, and grown men who'd been running equipment for two straight days sat down right there in the dirt like their strings had been cut.