Rescuers Improvise to Free Trapped Boy From Rock Crevice

When rescuers arrived, the 11-year-old boy was already jammed eight feet down the narrow crack in the rock and slipping lower each time he exhaled, sinking toward the point where the unyielding rock walls squeezing his chest would kill him.

A Los Angeles County Fire Department team, which had pulled victims from collapsed buildings in the Northridge earthquake and searched for survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing, faced the perplexing problem under a blistering Mojave Desert sun Tuesday and came up with the answer:

Timbers, leather straps and cooking oil.

More than a gallon of cooking oil.

The Urban Search and Rescue Team wedged timbers beneath the boy’s feet in a three-hour rescue operation in 97-degree heat, then drenched him with corn oil until he was greasy enough to slide out.

“It was really hot in there. . . . I wanted to get out,” said Paul Hartness of Lake Los Angeles after he was pulled from the foot-wide crack in a pile of desert boulders, which narrowed to just a few inches where his feet were lodged.

He slipped into the crevice while playing on the rocks with brothers Rodney Kunkel, 11, and Travis Kunkel, 9, who live near the outcropping, called Rainbow Peak. The brothers notified Hartness’ aunt, Annie Houtz, who called 911.

At 12:21 p.m., local firefighters arrived; search-and-rescue specialists arrived soon after.

Those first on the scene tried using ropes and webbing straps dropped around the boy’s chest to pull him to the surface. But he was wedged in too tightly. “It hurt him too much and they had to stop,” said County Fire Department Capt. Ron Roy, 45.

But with each breath, the boy slipped a fraction of an inch farther, slowly ratcheting into the crack that continued narrowing for 10 feet beneath him.

“Every time he would breathe, he would start to shift,” said county fire inspector Henry Rodriguez. “We were afraid if he went down too far, he wouldn’t be able to breathe” from the pressure of the rock walls against his chest.

But rescuers could get at the crack from one side. Balancing on boulders beside the crack, they managed to shove 2-by-10 timbers beneath his feet.

Others dropped padded leather straps to Paul to loop around his wrists. “Hang on to these as tight as you can,” they told him, according to Roy, who said he has a son about Paul’s age.

The boy had to be made slippery enough to overcome the friction of the rock face, but how?

“We were thinking maybe some kind of soap to make it slick,” said Roy. “Then we thought, oil . . . cooking oil.”

Houtz called the Lake Los Angeles store where she works and a friend rushed over a case of about 10 pint bottles of Springfield corn oil. Firefighters raced in with cooking oil from the kitchens of the nearest fire station.

By the quart, they sloshed the oil over the trapped boy and patiently waited for it to flow around him.

“It took a couple jerks to free him. He was wedged in there tight,” Jones said. His jeans slipped down and “as soon as his bare behind hit the oil on the granite he came out.”

Released from the Antelope Valley Medical Center after a checkup, with only cuts and bruises from his ordeal, he told reporters: “I’m really, really happy. It was just really exhausting.”

Of his rescuers, he added: “I thought they were heroes.”

Times staff writer Jill Leovy contributed to this story.