The search for the six-year-old boy who fell into a manhole in Soweto on Sunday hit another snag on Thursday as operations went into day 4.
The family of Khayalethu Magadla has also lost hope of ever finding the remains of their son.
For two days, city officials struggled to clear up a sewer chamber in Klipspruit near the Avalon cemetery, but there was still no headway in recovering Khayalethu.
This prompted rescue teams to retrace their steps, searching pipe lines in Klipspruit west and Dlamini 1, again without any success.
The Magadla family spokesperson, Zakhele Khumalo, said the family was discouraged by the little progress made by emergency services in recovering their son’s body as they were hoping to find closure sooner.
An emotional Khumalo questioned whether the search would ever yield any results. “Will we ever get our child?”
“It has been five days without him. Four days of searching and there is still nothing. This is really hard on us, we can’t say we have any hope that he will be found soon.”
He said Khayalethu’s parents were anxious to find their son.
He blamed the dilapidated water infrastructure for being a stumbling block in the search.
“If the infrastructure was in order this would be an easy mission. Now we have to wait for the splinter chamber to be cleared because the infrastructure has not been maintained and regularly cleared,”
“Sewage water is acidic. What condition will we find his body in when we find him?”
City rescue team spent most of Wednesday and on Thursday trying to vacuum rubble out of the chamber to reduce any backed up debris that may be prohibiting incoming debris.
The chamber is the central point where all sewage as well as debris flows to. Here officials were hopeful that they would make progress once it is cleared.
According to officials, the clearing might take two additional days to complete.
The physical search for the day reached a dead-end around 2pm when the teams had to regroup to device a new plan.
Johannesburg emergency spokesperson Robert Mulaudzi said while there was a chance two more days might be added to the search, water robotics would be used to assist with searching some unexplored pipes in an area that used to be an informal settlement in Dlamini.
“We are working with a private robotics company that will send down these robotics to see if they detect something. If they detect something, only then will we send our technicians down to inspect,” he said.
“After robotics have searched and cleared those areas, the only area we will be looking to get answers from will be the split chamber.”
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