Toddler rescued from heating duct

MILLVILLE -- The owner of a Center City rental house where a toddler fell into a heating duct has until Monday to secure all vents in the home and make other changes.

Two city housing code inspectors came Wednesday afternoon to a residence in the 600 block of North 3rd Street to see how 18-month-old Patrick Blakeslee ended up inside metal ducting early Sunday.

Firefighters had to rip out a plaster wall to expose the ductwork, and then attacked it with their hands and cutting tools. Meanwhile, firefighter Steve Alcorn kept talking to the screaming boy from the second floor.
"It must've been a hell of a ride for the boy," firefighter Doug Hallquist said Wednesday. "It was at least a 10-foot ride down a piece of ductwork."

The boy was pulled out at 9:24 a.m., according to a timestamp on a picture snapped by Fire Department photographer Dale Wettstein.

"As soon as I opened the ductwork and touched his head, he reached up," Hallquist said. "He quieted right down."

Hallquist pulled the diapered toddler out joking, "It's a boy!" "It was pretty tense down there," he added.

The incident started a little before 9 a.m. in a second-floor bedroom, where Patrick and his 2-year-old brother, Steven, sleep. Their mother, Ashley Kahn, and father, Paul H. Blakeslee, sleep in an adjacent bedroom.

Kahn said she heard the boys moving around and then an odd sound.

"So I went in there," she said. "And I found him all the way down in the vent."

"I saw Stevie there," Blakeslee said. "Then I heard Patrick crying, but I didn't see him. Then I saw that the vent cover was off. So I looked down, figure 12 feet, saw his head and his two hands."

Despite the fall, Patrick eventually was pulled from the duct without a single scratch.