BY DAVE PRICE
Daily Post Editor
On this day 20 years ago, a 2-year-old girl spent much of the night locked in a Redwood City bank vault, but was successfully rescued by firefighters and a drilling company.
The girl’s mother, Maria Sevilla, who was described in news accounts as a dedicated bank employee, brought her daughter Daniella to work that day. Somehow, the toddler wandered into the time-lock vault just before it shut at 6:30 p.m. on Aug. 14, 2003.
The bank, then located at 1615 Woodside Road, was in unincorporated Redwood City, a part of the Menlo Park Fire Protection District, whose firefighters responded to the unusual call.
Retired Menlo Park fire chief Harold Schapelhouman, then a division chief who was running the rescue, has written a narrative of the incident in his role as the fire district’s historian. Much of the following story is borrowed from his writings. And some of the information was from reports by then-Daily News reporter Jean Whitney.
The incident began when Daniella was in the bank lobby playing with another employee when her mother entered the 25-by-25-foot vault, not noticing that the girl had followed her into the vault and was sitting down behind some boxes out of view.
Her mother then exited the vault at 6:30 p.m., closing the heavily reinforced steel door and setting the electronically-controlled lock, insuring that the door could not be opened for the next 12 hours.
Then she discovered her daughter was missing and had been accidentally locked in the vault.
Then-Fire Capt. Bill McFarland, a founding member of the fire district’s National Urban Search and Rescue Task Force and part of the team that responded to the World Trade Center collapse, arrived and immediately realized the firefighters would need specially trained technical rescue personnel and equipment.
“So our only reasonable options were to either wait out the 12-hour timer or to try and penetrate the reported 20-inch thick steel reinforced concrete walls,” Schapelhouman wrote in his narrative.
The vault was ventilated but not temperature controlled. The door was left open for easy access during business hours but also because it got hot inside the small space. Given the circumstances, bank management agreed to let firefighters breach the vault.
But there were risks.
Firefighters were informed that the safety deposit box lockers were not secured to the walls and could be tipped over on the child if they weren’t careful. In addition, there was electric conduit in the wall that powered the vaults lighting and a fan system for air circulation.
Using the camera and its miniature speaker, Maria called Daniella’s name. She awoke, only to see a light, dark two-inch circular camera, strangely with her mother’s voice and looking back at her. She started to call for her mother but also became upset as to why she wasn’t there in person, as her mother worked to both calm and explain to her what was occurring. The girl had removed her clothes because of the warm temperatures in the vault.
Then firefighters planned to drill a 12-inch in diameter hole to allow the girl to crawl through. Because rescuers didn’t have that large of a drill bit, they asked Lombardo Diamond Concrete Coring Inc. of Santa Clara, who sent a technician.
It took 40 minutes to bore the 12-inch hole.
At this point, they were close to rescuing the girl. Daniella’s mother was given two small stuffed animals to help coax the girl through the opening. But it turned out that the girl needed no coaxing or encouragement to quickly crawl through the hole and into her mother’s arms, Schapelhouman said
They did it this way to avoid one agency, or individual, from rushing out with the child. A previous rescue in Texas from a ground water well had resulted in the rescuer committing suicide after claiming all the “glory” but being chastised by his co-workers, many of whom had been directly involved with the rescue operation themselves, according to Schapelhouman.
Daniella and her mother were taken to Kaiser Hospital for observation and released in the morning.