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Officers lifted the 47-year-old worker in a basket 80 feet up the side of an interior wall of the bridge tower to a catwalk on the New Jersey side after he slipped and fell nearly 15 feet in the 8:45 a.m. mishap, the authority’s Joseph Pentangelo told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
They then carried him up several flights of stairs, he said.
Fort Lee EMS took him to Englewood Hospital and Medical Center with injuries to his right leg and ankle that weren’t considered life-threatening.
The area where the worker fell, known as the New Jersey Anchorage, is a structure that extends 80 feet below the bridge tower into bedrock, Pentangelo explained.
It anchors four “barrel cables” that run the 4,760 feet of the bridge. These are different from the nearly 600 “stringer” cables that hang vertically along the bridge, he said.
To get to the worker, they had to descend 200 or so steep steps that, due to the weather, “were wet and partially iced,” Pentangelo said.
PHOTOS: Courtesy PORT AUTHORITY POLICE DEPT.
Officers involved: Lt. Thomas Michaels, GWB Tour Commander and Incident Commander; Sgt. Nadine Rhem, GWB Patrol Sergeant; Sgt. Tom Kennedy, ESU Supervisor; GWB Police Officers Peter Padilla, Joseph Ponzo, Peter Darius, and Anthony Mannarino; ESU Police Officers Michael Keller, Joaquin Portes, Raymond DeVito, Roanld Schibelski, William Freyman, and Glen Page.
Here, Pentangelo, PAPD Officer Michael Keller, “acting as the guide, is hoisted along with the aided [worker] from the concrete base to the catwalk.”
They reached the surface of the bridge at 10:22 a.m.
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