In the late hours of Monday, a trench collapsed in a Buffalo Grove front yard, trapping a worker who later died from his injuries.
Monday night, the victim was identified as Nikodem Zaremba, 27, from Elmwood Park, and rescuers worked desperately to save his life, but they were ultimately unsuccessful.
As workers rushed to the scene in the 1000 block of Aspen Drive, Chopper 2 was the first to fly overhead.
CBS 2’s Chris Tye stated that workers began digging through massive volumes of the material within minutes of receiving word that the man was buried unconscious beneath tonnes of earth.
For a while, the worker was reportedly stuck, unconscious, and not breathing, according to officials in Buffalo Grove.
Experts in the technical rescue were working “feverishly” to “uncover and retrieve the sufferer from the fall,” according to the town.
There was a scene where emergency personnel loaded what looked like a stretcher onto a vehicle.
The neighbors informed us that they had heard constant noise all morning from the sewer line repairs. A regular day was turned upside down as afternoon went to evening.
It’s quite crazy,” remarked Tom Perris, a nearby resident. Due to a large number of emergency cars, Perris could not drive home.
“A hole was being dug somewhere. A labourer had fallen into a hole while working construction outside this building, “As Perris put it.
Seventy minutes after the search and rescue operation began, at 6:35 p.m., Zaremba was successfully extracted and taken to Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights.
The hospital eventually became his final resting place. Meanwhile, investigators began examining the scene, which was illuminated, and delved into it to determine what had gone wrong.
Crews were still there at 10 o’clock at night, closing up the hole in the front yard with plywood.
Monday night, no one from Buffalo Grove’s PD, FD, or Village Hall was available for an interview.
We contacted the private plumbing repair service whose vehicle was parked nearby; they claimed to be the ones doing the work today. They didn’t have anything to say about it.
Source: CBS News