ALDERSON, W.Va. — A 2-year-old Greenbrier County boy died Tuesday after falling into a 1,000-gallon tank used as a dumping place for cooking grease.
The boy’s mother was using a car wash along Riverview Avenue at midday Tuesday when the boy wandered off, said Alderson police chief Jeremy Bennett. The mother said she was having a brief conservation with a man in the next bay, and when she turned around her son was gone.
“She immediately started looking for the child and then called for police assistance,” Bennett said. “While law enforcement was en route, other people were assisting her looking for her child and two citizens actually found the child in the tank.”
Bennett said CPR was performed on the boy from the time he was pulled from the tank to the time he arrived at Greenbrier Valley Medical Center where he was pronounced dead.
The concrete lid to the tank, which measured 16 x 24 inches, had been removed, Bennett said.
“The sad reality is this tank had no secondary means of locking it. There was nothing saying that anybody couldn’t have opened it, leaving it accessible to the whole world. We think that’s what happened that somebody opened the tank and left it open,” the chief said.
The boy’s candy was found on a two-foot retaining wall surrounding the tank, which sits about 40 feet from the car wash.
Bennett said the tank, in existence about 40 years, once was used for waste water from the car wash. More recently it has been used for food preparation waste from the nearby Riverside Food Mart.
Police were continuing the investigation Wednesday.
“I run EMS, fire and police and this is the call you never want to to get,” Bennett said. “You never want to have to deal with a child.”