A walk in the woods could have ended in tragedy as an eight-year-old boy fell into the crater of a volcano.
The child was on a stroll with his 38-year-old aunt in the Tlalpan area in southwestern Mexico City.
Following the incident, the boy’s aunt recalled that he approached the edge of Xitle’s crater and fell to a depth of some 50 metres.
The distraught woman was quickly reached by police officers, who then contacted rescue services to save the child.
Despite the chilling height, the boy survived but was severely injured in the fall, officials said.
The Public Security Secretariat said in a statement: “The officers quickly requested the support of the emergency services.”
These officials pulled the child from the crater, also supported by personnel from the Fire Department and the Commission for Natural Resources and Rural Development (CORENA), the statement added.
Rescuers provided the child with first aid, discovering he had suffered severe cranioencephalic trauma, injury to the left knee and probable fracture of the left shoulder.
Following the arrival of a helicopter, the child was flown to the Legaria Children’s Hospital, where medical specialists are treating his injuries.
The fall may be explained by the heavy rainfall recently battering Mexico City, which caused the terrain in areas surrounding Xitle, covered by vegetation and trees, to become slippery and sparked small landslides.
This incident is far from being isolated. Just a few weeks ago, another eight-year-old fell into a 100-metre-deep volcanic sinkhole crater in the Galápagos Islands.
The boy, a French national, was visiting with his family Los Gemelos, a pair of craters on Santa Cruz Island.
While rescue services managed to recover the child, he sadly died.
In 2017, another child, an 11-year-old boy, died after falling into a volcanic crater in the Campi Flegrei area near Naples, Italy.
The child is believed to have fainted due to the gas fumes released by the craters before falling inside it.
Xitle is an ash cone volcano with a slope between 30° and 40° and a 300-metre altitude.
The volcano only erupted during one period of time, between 245 and 315 AD.
Its explosion engulfed the city of CuiCuilco and created the 80-metre-square lava field known as Pedregal de San Angel.
