Two people traveling in a hot air balloon through the southern skies USA were stranded after the object’s casing became stuck in a gigantic tower.
After an impressive operation, they were able to rescued by a group of firefighters who carried out the dangerous and lengthy procedure.
Then, the passengers had to descend from a very high height and were taken to a hospital.
«We did not expect a rescue of such magnitude»: the preparations of the firefighters
on saturday February 28 in the morning, rescuers from the Fire Department of Longviewa city located in the state of Texas and which has around 80,000 inhabitants, attended a immense torre communications, after an incident is reported.
Upon reaching the structure, they noticed that there was a stuck hot air balloonat a height that would later be calculated at 274 metros from the ground. In the transport basket, A man and a woman were anxiously waiting to be rescued.
Faced with this scenario, firefighters set out to save people. The complex operation, which lasted several hours, involved more than a dozen firefighters stationed at different heights of the tower. These took approximately an hour to reach the couple that was in the basket of the balloon and provide them with ropes and harnesses to help them escape from the situation.
He video of the rescue, which was recorded by the Fire Department itself, shows the balloon’s multicolored fabric torn in some places and coiled around the tower and its guide cable, with the basket hanging below.
“When we teach string classes, this is precisely one of the scenarios that we consider a kind of Super Bowl of rope rescue,” said Lieutenant Stephen Winchell, to illustrate the difficulty that the rescue involved.
According to him, they are prepared for possible rescues in which an element gets stuck in the tower or in the cable, but the surprising thing was that this balloon was tangled in both.
«Simply we didn’t expect that today both scenarios will be combined in a rescue of such magnitude”Winchell said Saturday.
The details of a marathon rescue
Of the group of rescuers, only two participated in extracting the people from the basket.
Once this was tied to the tower by a rope, the firefighters secured another rope to the structure, a few meters higher, and of which, at the other end, the harnesses for the trapped people would be placed.
«I think they felt better once we put the harnesses on them,» Lt. Stephen Winchell said at a news conference after the episode, noting that the basket was moving in the wind.
This is how the rescue proceeded. The first to leave was the womanwho put on the harness and swung, hanging from the steel rope, towards the tower, while using the other strap to help her move. Upon arriving at the scene, firefighters helped her stabilize herself.
Seconds later it was the man’s turn, who repeated the action, but it took him a little longer to get settled once he reached the structure, although he finally managed it.
Another hour passed before rescuers secured them inside the tower. and they could begin the descent, which took almost two more hours, according to Longview Fire Chief Marcus Delaney at the press conference.
Although it was not known that they had any injuries, as a precaution, the rescued people They were taken to a hospitalaccording to what Delaney said.
Meanwhile, on Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration reported that it will investigate the balloon incident, which it identified as a Cameron Z-77.
