A teenager was rescued after getting her leg stuck in a drain during the Thai water splashing festival.

The girl, 14, was enjoying a water fight with her friends for the Songkran New Year party when she stepped on the metal drain cover in Chonburi, eastern Thailand.

She had walked backwards to avoid being soaked but her leg slipped through the narrow metal hole on April 17.

Rescuers arrived at the scene in front of a market and found the teen crying as she sat on the pavement, her right leg lodged painfully in the square gap.

Footage shows the officers pouring water and lubricant on the stuck limb before cutting the metal grate using specialised equipment.

Onlookers cheered as the girl was freed after 20 minutes. She limped into an ambulance and was taken to the Somdech Phra Nangchao Sirikit Hospital for further treatment.

She said: 'I tried to pull myself out, but I was stuck, so I started shouting for help. I was so scared that my leg would need to be amputated.'

A rescue volunteer said: 'The girl was very lucky. If the metal had been sharper or her leg had swollen more quickly, the situation could have turned out much worse.'

The Buddhist festival Songkran, which takes place every year from April 13 to April 15, marks the new calendar year in the ancient religion. It originated in India in the 6th century before being taken up by the Hindu-Buddhist Khmer Empire - the predecessor to modern-day Cambodia.

Followers splash each other with water to wash away the sins and bad luck of the past year. Traditionally, young relatives would pour water over the hands and feet of elders as a mark of respect.

However, the once-sedate festival has been commercialised by the avaricious Thai tourism industry and spawned into depraved alcohol-fuelled near-naked water fights across the country's major cities, with hundreds of thousands of tourists joining in the chaos to cool off as temperatures reach 40 degrees Celsius in the hottest month of the year.

Ministers have urged locals not to drink and drive while officials in Bangkok have banned alcohol at its official festival venues due to the rise in road accidents during the period.

There are also criticisms that it wastes water at a time when prolonged droughts are causing peril across the world.