This incident happened on October 25, 1994 in Chesterfield County at the Dutch Gap Power Station and involved a confined space rescue, high angle and technical rescue, and some creativity and a plenty of nerves of steel. A worker had been on the top of a 300-foot-tall smokestack had fallen but his fall was arrested by some of his safety equipment and he was hanging about 75 feet below the top on the inside the stack.
To illustrate the situation, here is a quote from a Post Incident Report:
“Firefighter Mark Berry volunteered to ascend the stack and recon it from the top. This ascent began on a stationary ladder outside the stack to a platform part of the way up. Then he scaled a contractor’s ladder to the top. He described the ladder as “homemade, held to the stack with thin wire and unsafe.” He used this ladder with fall protection provided by a steel cable the contractor had in place. Firefighter Berry hooked his harness into this cable. Once at the top, he could see the patient hanging on a cable approximately 75 feet below the opening of the stack. The patient was motionless and did not respond. Berry also found that the steel cable he was using as a safety was only held in place by the weight of a block and tackle hanging inside the stack . . .”
“Lieutenant Pruden ascended the ladder to the top. He used a safety climb technique which kept him attached to the ladder as he climbs. He and Berry positioned themselves straddling the rim of the stack. . . .[at one point] Lieutenant Pruden had to maneuver around a lightning rod to his right, during this time, he lost the security of being able to straddle the stack. . . .”
Now Battalion Chief Mark Berry, and Captain Pruden tell the story of that event – the incident that garnered them the department’s first ever Medals of Valor – with a few stories of our time together on shift at Fire Station 14.
The Firehouse Logbook Podcast 