"We have a bit more hope." So says the father of a 2-year-old who has been trapped since Sunday at the bottom of an 360-foot-deep well whose opening is just 10 inches wide. While machinery has been unable to get beyond 262 feet due to hard rock, rescue teams at the site in Totalan, Spain, as of Wednesday had "scientific evidence" the boy is at the bottom, reports the AP: DNA tests show that a number of hairs pulled from the well's soil belong to Julen (also reported as Yulen). In addition, a robotic camera that couldn't make it past 229 feet due to how narrow the well is on Monday spotted a bag of sweets the toddler had been carrying when he vanished during a countryside lunch.
An effort is now underway to carefully dig an intersecting tunnel; the expectation is that rescuers will access the bottom of the well via that tunnel by Friday. NBC News reports teams on site are also getting help from a Swedish company that assisted in locating the 33 miners who were trapped underground in Chile for 69 days in 2010; it is sending an unspecified tool that might help locate the boy. "My wife is broken... we are dead inside," father Jose Rosello said Wednesday. "It feels like we have been waiting for months ... but we hope we have an angel to get my son out of there." Per local media, the family's 3-year-old son died of a heart attack during a family beach walk in 2017. (More rescue stories.)
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