A missing 59-year-old woman who was rescued Monday from deep inside a storm drain system in Poway days after she had gone missing has died, authorities said Tuesday.
After coming to believe that Yafang Zhou was in the pipes, crews located and extricated her mid-afternoon, and raced her to a hospital in serious condition. She died about 4:15 p.m. Monday, a spokesperson for the Medical Examiner’s Office said.
Several questions remain about her disappearance, how long she may have been in the drain and how San Diego police located her. Police have declined to release details.
Zhou was last seen around midnight March 25 on Union Street just north of Broadway in downtown San Diego, according to a social media post police issued last week. Her family reported her missing April 3.
Four days later, the search for her took detectives to an area on Beeler Canyon Road, south of Scripps Poway Parkway. Police did not say why they headed to the area, which includes a hiking and biking trail and is more than 20 miles northeast of downtown.
Outside of a storm drain opening along Beeler Canyon Road, detectives found her belongings. They also heard the sound of a woman’s voice inside the pipe system and soon called the Poway Fire Department for help. The San Diego Fire-Rescue Department also responded, including its Urban Search and Rescue team.
Fire-Rescue Battalion Chief Erik Windsor said fire crews removed a manhole cover in the general area of the storm drain opening, inserted a powerful listening device and heard moaning. “With that confirmation of life, we inserted our rescuers into the storm drain system through one of the manhole covers,” he said.
But tight spots like storm drains can be fraught with danger, from dangerous gases to wild animals. “We don’t take putting people, rescuers into confined spaces lightly at all,” he said.
Urban Search and Rescue team suited up and headed into the storm drain — one headed right, the other headed left — in pipes so tight they had to army crawl, Windsor said. Each went as far as they could but did not find her.
Officials asked that small robots with cameras be brought to the scene so they could get a visual inside the pipes. And while those assets were on the way, rescuers started pulling open the manhole covers that dot Beeler Canyon Road in hopes of finding the woman.
After lifting up the cover of a manhole tucked near brush, they spotted the missing woman’s legs, Windsor said. A rescuer was lowered into the hole to strap the woman into a harness. Windsor said she was hoisted out within roughly 10 minutes and placed into a waiting ambulance.
Windsor said officials believe the woman had entered the storm drain system through a nearby outflow opening, the site where her belongings had been found.
Officials said no foul play is suspected.
