The Rescue of Baby Jessica

MIDLAND, Texas — Rescuers pulled 18-month-old Jessica McClure from an abandoned well late Friday, 58 hours after she slipped through an eight-inch pipe and fell 22 feet into the dark, ending an ordeal that had drawn the nation to a west Texas backyard.

The rescue came at 7:55 p.m., according to paramedics and drillers at the scene. President Reagan, watching from Washington like everyone else, said afterward, “The whole country had become godmothers and godfathers to that child during those fifty-eight hours.”

“Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you” (Psalm 50:15).

For two and a half days, the work above ground became a testimony to that promise. What began as a simple plan to sink a second shaft next to the well and punch through sideways turned into a fight against hard gray rock that crews said “didn’t want to give up an inch.”

How the rescue unfolded

According to the firsthand account of the rescue:

• Jessica fell Wednesday morning, October 14, while playing in her aunt’s yard. Rescuers could hear her crying faintly, and later singing a Winnie the Pooh song, from 22 feet below.
• Firefighters, police, and oil-field workers first tried jackhammers, but the rock stopped them. A mining engineer then brought waterjet cutting, using high-pressure water to slice through stone.
• After 45 hours, crews broke through to the well casing. Paramedic Robert O’Donnell worked his way sideways through the narrow tunnel, greasing Jessica’s skin with petroleum jelly and easing her out with forceps.
• At 7:55 p.m. Friday, October 16, paramedic Steve Forbes carried Jessica out of the parallel shaft, her head wrapped in gauze and her face bloodied, as rescuers wept and cheered.

What came after

Doctors at Midland General feared Jessica might lose her right foot, which had been bent above her head for 58 hours. They placed her in a hyperbaric chamber. That first night she ate an orange and then a popsicle. Surgeons saved the foot but had to amputate one toe to gangrene, and she carried a scar across her forehead from the well casing.

Robert O’Donnell, the paramedic who held her in the dark, struggled in the years after the rescue; he died by suicide in 1995, according to those who remembered the October he became a reluctant hero. Jessica grew up in Midland, graduated from Greenwood High School in 2004, and married Daniel Morales in 2006. She has no memory of the fall, the dark, or the singing.

This account is drawn from firsthand rescue narratives and contemporaneous news coverage of the Midland well rescue.