10-Year-Old Girl Sucked Into Drain Pipe Survives
Nashville, TENN. - Little Delaney Carrington should be a celebrity of sorts when she returns to school on Monday. The 4th grade honor roll student at Percy Priest Elementary has quite a story to tell about this week's record flooding.
"This part of the tire swing was underwater," Delaney told NewsChannel 5 Sunday afternoon, while leisurely dangling from the giant tree in her parents' frontyard in Forest Hills. "I've never witnessed a flood or anything like this."
Delaney's father, Shaun Carrington, an internet publisher in Nashville, and owner of two businesses, videotaped the events last Saturday, May 1, the day his daughter and a friend were swept away by a flooded ditch only a few doors down the road. Delaney was sucked into an 18-inch drainage pipe, completely submerged by floodwaters, and spit out the other side.
"(It) looked like she was asleep," Shaun said, recalling his daughter's physical state when he retrieved her from the fast flowing water. "She wasn't breathing, her lips were blue. She opened her eyes up at that point, and she just started breathing on her own."
Shaun is convinced his little girl blacked out during her quick, but frightening, underwater ride through all 36 feet of the pipe, end to end.
"I remember, uhm.. like brown, dirty water rushing to my face," said Delaney. "Because I can only remember being in the pipe, and then I can't remember going through the pipe."
Delaney's best friend and playmate that day, Marie, is getting credit for calling Shaun's attention to his daughter, who was immersed and out of sight.
"(Marie) was stuck," Shaun said, recounting his heroic rescue of Marie first. "And so, I really had to pull hard. She popped out, and I set her up on the bank and said, 'Where's Delaney?' And she said, 'She's down there!'"
The family is amazed that Delaney passed through with apparent ease, and never became snagged or hungup on the obvious bend in the pipe; nor was she ever tangled in flood debris.
"I just looked at her, I'm just glad to see her," Shaun said Sunday, admitting he sees his eldest daughter differently now.
There is no better way for a family to celebrate Mother's Day, than with a 10-year-old girl's second shot at life.