A 6-year-old girl and her family went on vacation in Playa Blanca, Lanzarote, when their time together went from fun to absolutely frightening once the little girl lost chunks of her hair and ended up fighting for her life due to a normal activity everyone has participated in. Now, her mother has come forward to send a warning to others before it’s too late.
Alex Morgan and her daughter Darcey were enjoying a deserved vacation. As the trip was soon ending, they chose to spend a little girl at their hotel, enjoy all the perks it had to offer them. Sadly, things turned tragic for this mother and daughter as the little girl was doing the simplest, common vacation activity – swimming in the hotel’s pool.
As Alex watched her daughter swim, she was horrified when she noticed Darcey wasn’t coming up for air. It didn’t take long for the mother to realize that her daughter was stuck underwater and was struggling to breathe. Darcey’s hair had gotten sucked into a swimming pool filter that was used to operate the hotel’s artificial waterfall and gotten tangled, trapping her underwater.
Thankfully, some nearby vacationers were able to think quickly and leaped into the pool to attempt to rescue Darcey. After being underwater for two minutes, the heroic rescuers were able to rip large clumps of the young girl’s hair to remove her from the filter’s grasp. When they surfaced, “Darcey was unconscious and had to be given CPR at the poolside,” Alex recalls, according to Daily Mail.
The young girl was immediately rushed to Arecife Hospital where several tests revealed that her oxygen levels were dangerously low and she had lots of fluid in her right lung. “Darcey lost four large clumps of her hair in total but she luckily never saw it and it all grows back,” Alex said. “This was the worst day of our lives. We are still suffering to come to terms with it all now but also feel incredibly lucky to still have our beautiful, brave little girl.”
Unfortunately, the hotel attempted to lie about the incident, claiming that Darcey had slipped poolside and that the hair was removed from the filter after the incident. She was absolutely livid to hear the management didn’t close the swimming pool or turn off the waterfall and filter in any way. In fact, she was even angrier when she learned that there were other instances where the filter sucked other vacationers’ clothing into it.
Now, Alex and her husband Gareth are trying to warn other people about the dangers in swimming pools and spoke out about the incident in a Facebook post. “Myself and Gareth don’t want any other parents/family members to go through what we experienced that day,” she explained, according to Mirror. “We will never get over what happened but if this post can raise some awareness, save someone’s life, then we will be happy.”
