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How a Markham man was left stuck in a well for hours

How a Markham man was left stuck in a well for hours

The 911 call that came in during the early hours of Sunday morning indicated that a man was trapped.

"A little boy came to our door, he said his dad is stuck in a hole," the caller said.

He had received the message from a six-year-old boy who knocked on his door in the middle of the night.

Two members of that caller's family went to check out the situation, and they indeed found that the boy's 44-year-old father was stuck in a well on a Markham, Ont., property near 9th Line and 14th Avenue.

He'd been stranded there for hours, standing in waist-deep water that was freezing cold.

The man had stepped on a rotting piece of plywood and fallen more than six metres down on Saturday night. He landed on his back.

And while he screamed for help, his young son initially couldn't hear him because he had fallen asleep in his father's truck.

More than three hours later, the boy woke up, found his dad and began trying to get help. He started out honking the truck's horn and eventually went knocking on doors of nearby properties across the street.

When firefighters got to the scene, they lowered a ladder down and the man climbed to safety. That happened shortly before 3 a.m.

The man sprained his right foot in the fall.

Click on the video above to see a full report from the CBC's Trevor Dunn.