A 14-year-old boy is simply thanking his lucky stars today that he didn’t drown. Tiago Silva’s face shows how close to disaster he came: he has two serious welts on his head and neck and frighteningly bloodshot black eyes.
The injuries result from him being literally sucked, face first, into the drainage outlet of an artificial lake in which he was swimming.
His horrified father said at first he worried his son would be blind.
“When I got to him, he was bleeding and he couldn’t see anything”, he told tabloid Correio da Manhã.
Fortunately, after a night in hospital, the young teen is now home and hopefully in recovery.
CM says doctors nonetheless “have not ruled out the possibility that he may need an operation to his eyes in the future”.
The family are adamant that no-one explained that the lake, in a leisure park in Oliveira São Pedro, Braga, was being drained for routine maintenance.
Augusto Carvalho, president of the local parish council has been peremptory, telling CM: “This is a place where no one is charged a penny. People know there are no lifeguards on duty. When maintenance is done, the park attendant advises whoever is around. This time, the instructions were not heeded”.
The teen’s parents – emigrés living in France but here their summer holidays – have made a formal complaint to GNR police against the parish council, saying they sincerely hope no other children have to endure a similar horror.
Tiago told CM’s reporter that he managed to extract himself from the outlet by “closing his eyes” and pushing back with his arms against the lake floor.
It will have been the pressure involved in doing so that left him with such badly damaged eyes.
