Farmer rescued after being trapped in well north of Edmonton for nearly 8 hours

Farmer rescued from abandoned well A farmer who fell into an abandoned well is telling his story of survival. David Ewasuk has more.

A farmer north of Edmonton considers himself lucky to have survived this harvest season.

That's no joke about poor weather conditions and long hours in the combine.

The evening of Sept. 26, Andy Shwetz in Waskatenau was heavy harrowing (breaking up and spreading straw on a combined field) on a quarter of land that contains a former town water well.

The well was marked. In the spring, Schwetz had filled it with rocks and clay.

But that night, when he stepped out of the tractor to assess whether he could harrow right over it, the ground fell away from his feet and he landed in about five feet of frigid, muddy water.

The situation was immediately bad: The water was up to his neck and the ground was about 14 feet above the water. His cell phone was sitting on the tractor's seat. It was dark and he had been working alone. His family were combining, but they were on another field. And, perhaps most importantly, he was expecting frost overnight. It was only 9:30 p.m.

But he found hope in having fallen feet first and not hitting his head.

"I thought, 'OK, there's a way out. I'll climb my way out of here,'" Shwetz told CTV News Edmonton in a recent interview.

"It wasn't a panic off the bat."

'DIDN'T THINK I WAS GOING TO MAKE IT'

Instead, the panic built as Shwetz failed time and time again to scale the cement casing.

He had fallen into the well with a survey stake in his hand. Using the bit of light that filtered down from his running tractor, he tried wedging the stake into the casing's holes as he pulled himself up.

It wasn't enough.

He took off his coveralls, which were soaked and freezing, and cowboy boots.

"I couldn't get any traction. The boots were real slippery on the bottom and I was just trying to get myself up. The stocking feet did a little better but I ripped up my feet bad," he told CTV News Edmonton.

"Get up to the top, fell down. Happened two or three times."

By then, the cold had zapped his strength.

"I couldn't move anymore. I was done. I didn't have any strength left to climb. That's when you start to worry."

His first thought was of his three sons and wife Shawnalee losing their father and partner. He thought of his friend – also a father and husband – who had recently died. He worried about the image Shawnalee would be left with if she found him dead, floating at the bottom of the well.

"You say your prayers, you say your last words. I really did think I wasn't going to make it," Shwetz said.

"That lasted about half an hour and then I started thinking, 'OK, this is my plan: I've gotta get out of the water, stay warm. The tractor's running, the lights are on. If I can stay 'til the morning, somebody's going to come and find me.'"

Shwetz propped himself above the water as best as he could using the stake and locking his muscles in place.

Then he waited.

At one point he thought he may have heard a vehicle door slam over the running tractor, but nothing else. No one came.

He could not hold himself out of the water any longer.

He waited some more.

'JUST LIKE MY SAVIOUR'

Shawnalee woke up in the middle of the night to realize her husband had not returned. His vehicle and equipment were not in the yard. He did not respond to her calls and texts.

So she headed out to the field where she had last seen him, when she was driving home with the kids from 4-H the previous evening.

She found the tractor still running in the pitch-black morning. The door was open and Shwetz's cell phone was dead on the passenger seat.

Within an hour, she had recruited help from family and a neighbour.

"She didn't know if I was underneath the equipment or whatever. She was expecting the worst. She thought maybe I was walking home for some reason, so she was running around the fields," Shwetz said. Still too traumatized, Shawnalee declined to do a formal interview.

Someone in the search group eventually shut off the tractor. That's when they heard, "Hello… hello…"

Noting his wife has a sixth sense, Shwetz commented, "I did have an idea she would probably show up when she needed to be."

"Just like my saviour."

'LOOKS LIKE YOU NEED SOME HELP'

It was roughly 5 a.m. when Casey Caron, Waskatenau's fire chief, arrived. Shwetz had been in the well for nearly eight hours.

"In most cases when someone's in distress we introduce ourselves and ask them what their names are. But in this case we didn't have to do that.

"I … looked down the hole and, 'Holy cow, Andy, looks like you need some help,'" he remembers saying.

"He was in very good spirits for being in the predicament he was for as long as he was."

Immediately, the volunteer firefighters used rope to secure the farmer. They and volunteer firefighters from Smoky Lake hatched a plan to drop a fire hose down to Shwetz, then hoist him up slowly with him sitting on it.

"That was as technical as it got," Caron said.

"We kind of train for stuff like that, but we don't practice that. That's not a common thing."

It worked as well as they needed it to. Shwetz was brought to the surface hypothermic and scraped up.

He spent nearly a week in hospital with rhabdomyolysis, a condition caused when damaged muscle tissue releases proteins and electrolytes into the blood, damaging the kidneys and sometimes resulting in permanent damage or death. He was told it was likely induced by straining his muscles to hold himself out of the water.

But he had survived.

"I'm so thankful for my life now. You take things for granted," he commented.

"I'll tell you: The meal I ate the next morning was better than any other meal I ever had."

Three weeks later, Shwetz' feet are the only thing still healing up.

"I'm trying to find a reason why that happened. There's gotta be something I do better," he said. "Shawnalee, now, makes me text where I am, where I'm working, and when I'm coming back. So that's a pretty big one. It works pretty good."

He also has a warning to other farmers.

"There's a ton of [wells] on these old farmyards… People need to be aware there's a big danger there. Sometimes you don't even realize it."

Alberta keeps information about the location of wells in a public online database.

With files from CTV News Edmonton's Dave Ewasuk and John Hanson