A man trapped for three days inside an 18-inch drain pipe about 20 feet underground was pulled to safety by Riverside firefighters and police after someone reported hearing him screaming for help inside the tunnel. Crews spent roughly two hours clearing debris and assembling specialized equipment before bringing him out the same way he apparently went in. He was treated for unspecified injuries and taken to a local hospital, where he was listed as stable.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Riverside police and fire departments responded around 11:40 a.m. Saturday to a call about a person screaming for help inside a drain tunnel. Fire Department Division Chief Greg White said the man was 20 feet into the pipe and “unable to free himself.” Crews removed considerable debris from the pipe before they could reach him, the newspaper reported.
A Narrow Pipe Near the Train Tracks
The pipe runs below the surface, parallel to the ground, and drains into a canal near the train tracks by Commerce and Cottage streets in Riverside, per the Times. Steve Hallgreen said the pipe was small and its size appeared to be what caused the man to get stuck, and he said the man may have entered the pipe from the canal running beside the tracks. Police shut down the train tracks, which are used by several lines, while the fire department carried out the rescue.
Rescue crews assembled a technical rescue team and specialized equipment before extracting the man, the same account noted, and he was ultimately brought out through the identical route he had used to enter. An incident report cited by the Times said help was requested from Corona Urban Search and Rescue during the operation. Hallgreen said calls about people trapped in pipes are very infrequent for the department.
Echoes of Past Pipe Rescues Across California
Riverside has dealt with this kind of emergency before. In 2020, Riverside County and Cal Fire firefighters freed 28-year-old Jacob Turpin after he spent nine hours wedged 270 feet inside an 18-inch-wide storm drain in Temecula, according to the Los Angeles Times. Turpin was transferred to a hospital with moderate injuries after that effort.
Similar standoffs have played out elsewhere in the state. In Antioch, a man was found trapped about two days in a 16-inch storm pipe 15 feet underground in 2022, and The Guardian reported he was not injured but showed signs of dehydration before being taken in for evaluation. That same Antioch incident, detailed by Firehouse, required 40 firefighters working three simultaneous extraction plans to pull the man from a pipe that stretched roughly 150 feet.
Other California departments have turned to technology to manage these confined-space emergencies. Oxnard police used robots to pinpoint a man's location inside a 36-inch drainpipe in 2024, as reported by FireRescue1, while San Francisco firefighters that same year rescued a man who had crawled roughly 20 feet below a city street into a sewer pipe. In Clinton, a robotic camera located a man trapped for about 10 hours approximately 450 feet from where he had entered a drainpipe, according to Cleveland.com.
No further details on how the Riverside man ended up inside the pipe, or what happened during the three days he was trapped, have been released.
