Danielle Tammone was pulled from an eight-foot cesspool in her Bohemia, Long Island backyard Thursday after neighbors she had never met rushed to her rescue.
Tammone, 47, had just plunged into the overflow pit as her golden retriever Daisy looked on, and the first moments underground left her disoriented and alone. “Okay… what just happened?” she recalled asking herself in a 1010 WINS interview. “Like, where am I? Alright I’m in the ground. You’re in a hole, wow.”
The physical therapist’s feet had given way with terrifying speed. “It happened so quickly — my feet just sunk a little bit, but it was like seconds. I didn’t even have time,” she told 1010 WINS. “And then I was just ‘hoop!’ down the hole. Just in the ground.”
Panic set in as Tammone grasped the danger. “And then the panic starts, because you’re like wow I could die today. This could not end well. I could be buried alive,” she said. The stone structure was partially crumbling, with lawn sod dangling precariously overhead as she yelled for help.
Her screams reached Christine Chanowsky and another neighbor, though they initially searched in the wrong direction. “At first, we thought she was in the shed or something. We were not looking on the ground,” Chanowsky said. The neighbors, whom Tammone had never met before Thursday, urged her to keep making noise while they dialed 911. “And they said keep screaming, don’t stop screaming,” Tammone recounted.
Backyard footage obtained by 1010 WINS captured the rescue’s urgency. “Oh my God, she fell into the ground,” one neighbor cried out, adding, “we are on the phone with 911.” The other called down reassurance: “You’re going to be fine, Danielle. They are on their way.”
First responders arrived with a full contingent. “Firemen, cops, ambulance, special unit, EMTs — they were wonderful,” Chanowsky said. After a tense ten-minute ordeal, rescuers lowered a ladder and hauled Tammone from the pit.
Chanowsky’s relief poured out once Tammone was safe. “I was tearing up. I was crying. As soon as she got out of the hole, just gave her the biggest hug,” she said.
Despite the trauma, Tammone found a small bright spot in the emergency response. “And they all sang happy birthday to me. It was great,” she beamed in her 1010 WINS interview.
Whether sewage was present in the cesspool remains unknown.