The terrifying thing imagined by anyone who has ever looked too long at people working on the outside of a high-rise happened on Friday morning: A pair of construction workers spent many minutes hanging above Lexington Avenue and 57th Street when one end of the scaffolding they were standing on came loose as it was hoisted between a building’s 12th and 13th floors. One man ended up trapped on top of the “nearly vertical” scaffolding, while the other was left dangling in his safety harness. “I saw his foot and I couldn’t even handle it,” said a woman whose office window was in the middle of the action.
Members of the FDNY and the NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit eventually rescued the very freaked-out workers by pulling them in — uninjured! — through the building’s windows. “He had the death grip,” said Officer Sean Dequatro of the guy who was stuck on top of the broken equipment. “He didn’t want to go down, he didn’t want to come in.”
Just try to look at this footage, obtained by NBC New York, without feeling at least a little sick:
