LOS ANGELES _ Los Angeles firefighters have found 13-year-old Jesse Hernandez alive in the sewer system near Griffith Park, authorities said Monday morning.
Hernandez, who was spending Easter with his family at the park, fell into the sewer system Sunday afternoon after jumping on wooden planks in an abandoned maintenance building. One of the planks broke and the teen plunged 25 feet into a 4-foot-wide pipe.
Los Angeles Fire Department officials said they found Jesse "alert and talking" as they were inserting cameras into a maintenance hatch west of the Ventura Freeway under Interstate 5. Rescue crews gave him a cell phone so he could call his family to let them know he was OK.
He was taken to a nearby hospital for a medical examination.
Fire officials said they had searched about 2,400 feet of pipe in a network that parallels the L.A. River and crosses under freeways.
They studied maps of the closed sewage pipe system, which stretches hundreds of feet, and sent a camera attached to a flotation device, like a boogie board, 300 feet down a pipe. They set up at different areas, including the L.A. River and a drain near Chevy Chase Drive, hoping the boy would come through one of the pipes.
"That place is a maze," Los Angeles Police Sgt. Bruno La Hoz said Sunday evening. "We don't know where the drain pipe goes to."
The pipe system has varying depths of water moving at roughly 15 mph. Rescuers couldn't enter the drainage area themselves because of the hazardous environment, said David Ortiz, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department.
About 20 of the boy's family members, including his mother, aunt and cousins, were at the scene Sunday evening.
