“John is a tough SOB,” his neighbor told BuzzFeed News.
An Arizona man fell down a 100-foot mine shaft on Monday and was trapped there until Wednesday, when a concerned friend arrived to check on him and heard him screaming for help. John Waddell, 62, was found dehydrated and with broken bones in the Maricopa County mine shaft.
He’d had to kill three rattlesnakes to avoid getting bitten. “John is a tough SOB,” said Mike Balowski, 67, a friend of Waddell’s, who lives just a few homes up from him near Wickenburg, Arizona.
Balowski explained that Waddell was an experienced miner and had gone to his property in nearby Aguila to prospect for “old artifacts, semiprecious stones, some precious metals.”
The property has two mines, and this particular one had not been explored in a while. Waddell had erected the structure over the mining shaft in the last week so that he could lower himself down by rope, explained the sheriff’s office.
He was lowering himself into a mine when “he just lost the ability to control the friction on the descent down the rope,” said Roger Yensen from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office Mountain Rescue Posse, in a press conference.
For the rest of this article: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amberjamieson/mineshaft-accident-arizona-rattlesnakes