20.02.2013

Men rescued from boom lift

Two men stranded in the platform of a 120ft boom lift in Chelmsford , Massachusetts escaped by abseiling down to the ground yesterday.

Matthew West and Luke Fischer, two employees of Pinnacle Cellular, were using a JLG Ultra boom rented from United Rentals to work on a Sprint mobile telephone antenna on the side of a large water tower when the lift developed a fault of some kind or simply ran out of fuel?
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The two men abseiled down from the platform, one at a time

After calling on co-workers to help them the emergency services were eventually called in but were unable to reach the two. So finally Brian West – Mathew’s brother – climbed up a ladder onto the top of the tank and abseiled down to the rim near the platform. He then used additional ropes he had with him to allow the two men to lower themselves to the ground.

The rescue took four hours in conditions that were extremely cold, wet and windy.

Vertikal Comment

The machine was recovered quickly enough after a mechanic arrived and drove off under its own power. We do not know what caused it to stop, but it would seem that there was no plan of rescue in place, one has to wonder if anyone on site knew what the emergency lowering method is for the machine or not?