All that separated 18 Vigo County inmates from freedom was a kick to the wall where some of them had been chiseling away at the mortar and block in a ventilation duct above their Indiana jail cell.

“All they would have had to do was sit on their butts and kick — those bricks would have all come down,” Sheriff Jon Marvel said during a news conference about the near-escape from the Vigo County Security Center.

No one escaped and no one was injured, he said. Marvel said he and jail supervisor Mike Ciolli discovered the breach on a routine perimeter inspection late last week. Marvel noticed a broken brick on the southwest corner of the jail.

On further inspection of the “N” pod inside the jail, staff discovered inmates had removed the “security ceiling” by loosening screws with fingernail clippers. Once in the ventilation shaft, inmates then used metal “tools” (pieces of debris from an old renovation, Marvel said) to chisel the mortar from about four 8-by- 16-inch interior concrete blocks.

One tool used was a 2 1/2-foot long metal strap for holding up pipes in the duct area. Construction material and boards in the duct were used as platforms while inmates chiseled at the masonry. The outer brick wall was broken through, and inmates had used masking tape, presumably from their commissary bags, to hold the bricks in place to avoid detection, according to Marvel.

Inmates were able to lower a rope through the opening to the ground where a cell phone was attached and lifted back up, along with a bag of tobacco and marijuana, Marvel said. The ground below is enclosed with a barbed-wire fence. Marvel said a strong person could bend the gate and get in. Officers are investigating that breach.

After discovering the attempted escape, jail staff transported 10 of the inmates from “N” pod to another facility, and placed the other eight in different parts of the jail. Jail staff could not give details about the inmates who were housed in “N” pod, such as what kind of sentences they were serving and for what kind of crimes.