Worker Trapped, Killed as Trench Floods

A construction worker was swept to his death beneath Pacific Coast Highway Wednesday morning when an open trench flooded and trapped him deep inside an underground pipeline.

Alonso Marquez Miramontes, 28, of Bell Gardens was working inside the narrow pipeline when a backhoe broke a nearby high-pressure waterline and flooded the trench. After a frantic search, rescue workers found him caught inside the pipeline, nearly 250 feet away, where he had either been carried by the rushing waters or crawled in an attempt to escape.

Miramontes was pronounced dead by paramedics even before they could pull his body from the pipeline, buried 15 feet below the highway.

The flooding touched off a furious, two-hour search by rescue workers who dug a hole through the highway about 200 feet north of the accident site and broke into the underground pipeline. Rescue workers, wearing lighted helmets, were hampered by the narrow diameter of the pipe and were forced to crawl on their stomachs, pulling air tanks attached to skateboards behind them.

After the trench was cleared of water, several co-workers crawled into the pipeline in a desperate attempt to save Miramontes themselves, but the 27-inch opening proved too difficult to negotiate.

“These are brave men down there,” said Jack Stubbs, a spokesman for the San Clemente Fire Department. “They were running into problems with debris and water in the pipe that made the work very difficult. But if this happened again tomorrow, they’d be right down there again.”

The accident occurred near where Pacific Coast Highway runs parallel to the nearby Amtrak line between San Diego and Orange County. Because of the possibility that train vibrations could jeopardize digging during the rescue attempt, all Amtrak trains running along the line were halted for more an hour.