Rescue team saves man on water tower
Published: June 7, 2007
“We had been talking about using that tower as a training site,” Lt. Jerry Odum of the Marion Fire Department said Wednesday. “Now we’ve been there.”
Odum was referring to a water tower on the city’s east side, on Boulevard near the Marion Youth Center.
It was a real-life emergency, though, and not a training exercise that sent a regional rescue team 140 feet into the air to rescue a man who was part of a crew working on satellite equipment attached to the tower.
“The man had collapsed on top of the tower because of some medical condition,” Odum said. At that point, Marion’s fire department activated the team, which included firefighters from Herrin and Carterville along with nine Marion firefighters.
The rescue took 2 hours and 10 minutes, Odum said, “and we used 2,000 feet of rope and a lot of hardware.” It was particularly difficult, he said, because there were no anchoring points on the tower from which to lower the man.
The rescue involved attaching a rope to a pulley for the controlled descent, as well as devising a backup system to ensure the victim’s safety. The man, who may have suffered from a heart condition, was strapped into a rescue basket, then lowered to the ground. Dozens of people gathered at the scene or watched from their homes as the drama unfolded.
Once on the ground, the man was taken by ambulance to Heartland Regional Medical Center. At the request of the man’s family members, his employer refused to release information on his identity or his condition.
Several hundred hours of training in high rope rescue paid off, Odum said. “We had mutual aid from Herrin and Carterville because we all had trained together as a team and continue to train together.”
The rescue equipment and training have been provided through Homeland Security funding from the state, Odum said. They train together on a regular basis. Last year, the team’s most dramatic training exercise involved using ropes to bridge the chasm between two of the highrise residence halls at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
On Tuesday, though, the real thing eclipsed any training they could have imagined.
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