Debora Hunt was cooking tea when she realised her eldest son had still not returned home from school. “Where’s Ethan?” she turned and asked her husband, Eamon. “I’m really worried about him.”
Though a million different scenarios were running through her mind, nothing could prepare the mum-of-two for the truth. Ethan hadn’t missed his train or been kept behind at school – the 16-year-old was fighting for his life in the Manchester Ship Canal.
Debora can recall the moment she found out what had happened through a Facebook post. “I honestly thought I’d lost him,” the 53-year-old told the Manchester Evening News. “I screamed at my husband to get to the locks as soon as possible.”
Ethan, who lives in Irlam, had been making his way home from St. Antony's Roman Catholic School in Stretford when the incident happened on January 10. He was walking along Irlam Locks when he came across a flooded pathway.
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To get around the flood, he walked out onto a docking jetty. But with no lights and heavy rain battering down, Ethan accidentally stepped off the edge and fell right into the water below.
“He decided that because the path was flooded, he would use the little jetty thing to cut out the section of the flood,” Debora continued.
“There were no lights on there so he basically couldn’t see where he was going. He walked off the end of it straight into the canal – it's quite the drop as well.”
The teenager managed to remove his backpack – which contained his trainers, his phone and his schoolbooks – and frantically swam to the surface. He managed to grab onto a concrete post and clung onto it while he screamed for help.
Miraculously, three men were walking along the canal path and heard Ethan’s cries. With no lifebuoy at the dock, one was forced to run to a nearby worksite and grab some rope.
They threw it into the canal and managed to pull Ethan from the water. Emergency services including police, fire crews and paramedics, were all called to the scene.
It's estimated he had been in the water for around 10 minutes before he was rescued. Paramedics told his distraught family if he’d been in there any longer, the outcome could have been very different.
“Hypothermia was setting in,” Debora, who works as a data processor for the NHS, continued. “It’s very scary. There’s just no protection there. The worst of it is, there isn’t even a lifebuoy. There’s no rings along there. The men that rescued him said if there had been a ring it would have been easier to get him out.”
Debora and Eamon were out looking for Ethan when Debora was sent a screenshot of a Facebook post. It read: “Just pulled a young lad from the canal, Ethan Hunt, does anyone know his parents?”
By the time Debora and Eamon got to the docks, there was no one there. As they went to leave, Debora received a phone call from her youngest son saying a policeman was at their home.
“I went home and that’s when we found out what had happened,” she said. “The policeman said he was fine but in hospital.
“The Saturday before it happened, a man had been pulled out of the canal and unfortunately he didn’t make it. That was fresh in my mind and I genuinely though I’d lost him. It was sheer panic.”
Thankfully Ethan only suffered bruises and scrapes as a result of being pulled from the water. Although he escaped the incident unharmed, Debora says the teenager has been left struggling emotionally.
“He’s battered, bruised and scraped,” she said. “They had to yank him up by a rope and they dragged him up over the side of the concrete.
“But he’s struggling, he’s really struggling. He didn’t sleep for the first few nights. Every time he shut his eyes, he would say, ‘Mum, I’m back in the water and it’s freezing, I’m scared’.”
Debora now says she will be forever grateful to the three men who rescued her son. “We took them a bottle each and a thank you card,” she added. “They’re my heroes.”
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