Tunnel collapse kills man digging for copper wire along river, Oklahoma cops say
A man was found buried under nearly 10 feet of sand days after a tunnel he was working on collapsed, according to police in Oklahoma.
The Tulsa Police Department said officers were called to the Arkansas River at about 11:45 p.m. Saturday, March 4. A woman reported that her boyfriend was buried under sand as he was “tunneling into an embankment,” according to a news release shared on Facebook.
She also said her boyfriend had been digging the tunnel for several weeks, a “project” that started after he spotted copper wire popping out of the embankment, police said. She first found the tunnel had collapsed on Thursday, days before police were called to the scene.
Officials said the girlfriend was not able to tell officers exactly where the tunnel was because it was about midnight at the time. The next day, police worked with the Tulsa Fire Department, a cadaver dog, the Medical Examiner’s Office, an anthropologist and an excavator to recover the man’s body.
His family has been notified, police said.
Lt. Josh Goldstein with the Tulsa Police Department said authorities are not “accusing him of stealing copper wire,” FOX23 reported.
“He had found copper wire down there, I was looking at it, I can’t tell that it looked like it was attached to anything, it almost seemed like it was just a strand of abandoned copper wire, maybe years ago was running across the river,” Goldstein continued. “I don’t know but he had somehow found a load of it and was following that backwards and bringing it out.”
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