Outside of a Denny’s restaurant in Wisconsin, there are two plastic manhole covers that don’t look like they’re a portal to anything particularly dangerous. While walking by them last week, a 3-year-old boy accidentally dislodged an unsecured cover and fell inside the pit it covered. That was an 8-foot-deep and incredibly stinky grease pit.

If you’re wondering why there are unsecured covers on deep grease pits, well, you’re not alone in that. How this happened was that the 3-year-old didn’t like his mother’s answer when she told him that he couldn’t jump on the wet, slippery-looking plastic covers that were near the sidewalk. Being a 3-year-old, he stomped his foot, but that foot was on one of the manhole covers. His tiny stomp knocked the cover off the hole, and the child lost his balance and fell in.

The parents panicked, since they didn’t know how deep the hole was or where it led: they thought it might run to the sewer system. It’s only 8 feet deep, as it turns out, but that doesn’t make it a lot less dangerous.

The boy’s father pulled him out by the hood of his coat, and passersby pitched in to help clean him off after removing his clothes with their water bottles and baby wipes from their diaper bags.

He was taken to the hospital to make sure he hadn’t swallowed or inhaled any of the noxious substance,

Mother says she feared losing her son in grease pit [Post-Crescent]

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