On Monday, Lee County first responders came together to save a 73-year-old woman trapped in a culvert pipe at a Cypress Lake apartment complex. According to the Iona McGregor Fire Department, their fire crews joined the South Trail Fire Protection & Rescue Service District, Lee County Public Safety and the Lee County Sheriff’s Office to reach the woman trapped inside the pipe. The woman was found around 50 feet into the pipe when first responders arrived. One firefighter entered the pipe to make contact with her; fortunately, the woman was able to communicate the entire time. In confined space situations, firefighters always want to have two exit options, so a crane operator lifted a piece of the concrete on the other side of the pipe. “I happened to look and I see police cars and a rescue squad,” said Mike, a neighbor who witnessed the operation. Mike also saw why the woman crawled into the pipe in the first place. “A turtle went into that drain and she went after it, OK?” Mike said. “Now, I don’t know what she’s gonna do with it, but she got stuck in there!” Neighbors say they all looked from 10 a.m. to almost 4 p.m. before the woman was found. “I’d say she was in there a good seven hours,” said neighbor Jackie Montaro. “They had the helicopter, they had the drones, and then they had the drone that went into the water. And then all of a sudden, they had looked in the pipe, but she crawled so far in they didn’t see her.” Firefighters were able to move the woman onto a board and set up a simple rope system to extract her from the confined space. Lee County EMS safely transported her to the hospital. “It’s a miracle that they found her in the pipe and that she was alive,” Montaro said. According to IMFD, it only took around five minutes to get the woman out of the pipe.