A mum was left worried sick when she realised that her son was late coming back from school.
Deborah Hunt didn't realise that her 16-year-old son Ethan had not been kept back at school, but was in fact fighting for his life in the Manchester Ship Canal.
It was through a post on Facebook that horrified Deborah discovered that Ethan had been pulled from the Manchester ship canal, the Manchester Evening News reports.
Deborah, 53, from Manchester said: “I honestly thought I’d lost him. I screamed at my husband to get to the locks as soon as possible.”
Unknown to Deborah Ethan had been coming home to Irlam from St Antony's Roman Catholic School in Stretford on January 10 when he encountered a flooded pathway.
The 16-year-old walked out onto a docking jetty to get round the flood, but the combination of poor lighting and heavy rain led him to accidentally step off the edge into the water.
“He decided that because the path was flooded, he would use the little jetty thing to cut out the section of the flood,” Debora continued.
“There were no lights on there so he basically couldn’t see where he was going. He walked off the end of it straight into the canal – it's quite the drop as well.”
Ethan was able to remove his backpack, which had his phone in, and swim to the surface where he clung to a concrete post and shouted for help.
By a stroke of extreme luck, three men happened to be walking along the canal path and heard Ethan, with one running to a nearby work site to grab some rope as there was no life ring.
The men threw the rope into the water and were able to pull Ethan to safety, meanwhile police, fire crews, and ambulances were all called.
Ethan was in the water for around ten minutes, with paramedics saying that if he had been in the water much longer it could have been very different.
“Hypothermia was setting in,” Debora, who works as a data processor for the NHS, continued. “It’s very scary. There’s just no protection there.
"The worst of it is, there isn’t even a lifebuoy. There’s no rings along there. The men that rescued him said if there had been a ring it would have been easier to get him out.”
Deborah and Eamon were out searching for Ethan when she received a Facebook post from one of the men saying: "Just pulled a young lad from the canal, Ethan Hunt, does anyone know his parents?”
But by the time Debora and Eamon got to the docks there was no one there, then Debora received a phone call from her youngest son saying a policeman was at their home.
“I went home and that’s when we found out what had happened,” she said. “The policeman said he was fine but in hospital.
“The Saturday before it happened, a man had been pulled out of the canal and unfortunately he didn’t make it. That was fresh in my mind and I genuinely though I’d lost him. It was sheer panic.”
Thankfully Ethan only suffered bruises and scrapes as a result of being pulled from the water. Although he escaped the incident unharmed, Debora says the teenager has been left struggling emotionally.
“He’s battered, bruised and scraped,” she said. “They had to yank him up by a rope and they dragged him up over the side of the concrete.
“But he’s struggling, he’s really struggling. He didn’t sleep for the first few nights. Every time he shut his eyes, he would say, ‘Mum, I’m back in the water and it’s freezing, I’m scared’.”
Debora now says she will be forever grateful to the three men who rescued her son. “We took them a bottle each and a thank you card,” she added. “They’re my heroes.”
