"That's clearly not going to be very helpful given the large amount of rain we have already seen this month," said a spokesman.
Rainfall of up to 30mm was predicted for today and tomorrow by the Met Office, with the worst weather likely in western areas. She had asked for ice-cream and chocolate. We've still got our family." She said that Leona was on antibiotics and would be in hospital for a few more days, but was clearly improving. I just thought, 'Where will it go? It can only go to the river - it isn't designed for anything else.'"īeverley said: "I really am proud of him. At the time, I didn't want to think about my daughter going through that. I don't know if the dog barrelled through and helped her. There was no space and the force of the water knocked any swimming out. "She banged her head on a rock in the tunnel. She said, 'I couldn't do them daddy because I was stuck in a tunnel'. He said: "She was trying to do a star float but couldn't because she was 'squashed'. Safety officers immediately checked other drains in Riverside Park.īaxter said that Leona, who is recovering in the University Hospital of North Durham, remembered most of her ordeal. Both she and her dad are lucky to be alive." Exhausted and with his boots waterlogged, Baxter clung on to the riverbank for the three minutes it took for a fire crew, paramedics and police to arrive.įirefighter Steve Hagar, who was one of the first on the scene, said: "If there'd been a grate on the other end of the pipe or the girl had been a bit bigger she would have been stuck underground. He managed to hand the child to his wife who started first aid and Leona coughed, cried and was violently sick, spewing out water. She was completely still and wasn't breathing." The water was about up to my shoulder height. She was floating face down in the river," he said. He ran to the Wear and saw what looked like the child's coat being dragged away. While a passerby dialed 999, Baxter thought: it's a storm drain of some kind and if it's going to spill out somewhere it would be in the river. Then I heard Bev cry out and looked up to see the dog being sucked down the same hole."
"I stuck my arm in but I couldn't feel anything. "That's when I noticed there was a swirling whirlpool effect. "I threw a stick for the dog and then I heard Bev shout "Leona." I looked around for her and saw Leona wasn't there. He and his wife Beverley, a hotel receptionist at Scotch Corner on the A1, had offered Leona, her six-year-old sister Kia and Brophy a run-around after visiting the children's great-grandparents at Chester-le-Street. "The kids had their wellies on and were really enjoying splashing around," he said yesterday, as fire crews warned of more rain tomorrow across most of the country. After scrabbling vainly at the drain's displaced metal cover, he ran to the river and grabbed the child just as currents were about to carry her away. Squashed and drowning, she smashed into a rock in the tunnel, and was then spat into the river Wear, at Chester-le-Street, County Durham, along with her pet mastiff Brophy.Įmergency services last night praised the girl's father Mark Baxter, a 34-year-old RAF sergeant, for "incredibly quick thinking" which saved her life on Sunday evening. The storm drain was so narrow that Leona Baxter's face, arms and legs were scraped raw. A three-year-old girl sucked into a hidden storm drain as she played in a park was forced for 70 metres through an underground concrete pipe before her father leapt into a swollen river to save her.
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