An elderly woman screamed in pain after falling into her apartment dumpster and getting compacted in a trash truck – four times.

The 60-year-old woman was emptied from a dumpster into a sanitation truck in Manchester, New Hampshire, during the trash collection day on Monday around 1pm, according to fire officials.

After the garbage was compacted at least four times, the driver noticed the woman through a camera on the lorry.

The driver called 911 and first responders executed a rescue mission that took about a half hour. Neighbors watched as rescuers used a basket lifted by a fire truck crane to hoist her out of the lorry.

‘All you heard was screaming,’ neighbor Amanda Czzowitz told Boston 25 News. ‘She was in agony.’

It was a difficult process to access the woman and take her out from the top of the truck, the fire department told Boston.com. She was placed on a stretcher and rushed to Eliot Hospital in serious condition. She is expected to recover.

It was not immediately known how long she was in the dumpster before it was emptied into the lorry.

‘In 32 years, I’ve never seen anything like this my whole career,’ Battalion Chief Bob Beaudet told WMUR.

‘It’s alarming, because you don’t really think it’s true. You don’t think it really happens, but in this day and age, times are tough, and people do different things. So, that was definitely one for the books.’

The woman, who has not been identified, told firefighters that she fell into the dumpster while throwing away trash at her apartment complex on Beech Hill Drive.

She was able to speak through a side access panel of the lorry but could not answer firefighters’ questions, they said.

Neighbors said she was a fellow resident at the complex.

‘My kids are home from school, and they’re watching,’ neighbor Matthew Czzowitz told Boston 25 News. ‘I was like, girls, once you see her come out, I don’t want you watching.’

It happened nearly two years after 18 people were rescued from the back of a refrigerated lorry at a service station in Cambridgeshire in the East of England.

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