Girl in critical condition pulled from bottom of sea at Phuket beach

PHUKET: Doctor’s are scrambling to save the life of a girl who was pulled unconscious from the sea floor at Nai Harn Beach today.

“She arrived at about 3pm in critical condition,” Vachira Phuket Emergency Medical Service nurse Ladda Thongtan told the Phuket Gazette.

The girl was one of four children pulled from the water during the rescue.

Eyewitnesses to the near-drowning said the girl, thought to be about 11 years old, was playing in the 2-meter deep water just past the mouth of the lagoon with a group of children.

“We asked around, but nobody knows her,” Nai Harn chief lifeguard Jula Nontree said.

“The children were shouting for help, so a foreigner and a lifeguard rushed to rescue them.”

Three of the children were quickly saved, but the girl disappeared underwater.

“We had to dive to find her. It took a few minutes before we were able to pull her out and start administering CPR [cardiopulmonary resuscitation],” Mr Jula said.

The girl was given CPR continuously for the 10 minutes it took an ambulance from the Phuket Provincial Administration Organization (PPAO) Rescue Center to arrive.

In 2012, the chief lifeguard at the beach, Samart Chandee, had considered getting extra funding to allow for a lifeguard to be responsible solely for the lagoon area after two children drowned in about 2 months (story here).

The drowning of a 9-year-old Russian boy in April last year led to a renewed call for parents to carefully watch over their children as they played in the popular lagoon (story here).

— Chutharat Plerin