He’d been in the water for nearly two hours. With the quicksand seal ruptured, they now could hoist him out with a rope and pulley system. Brevard County Fire Rescue photo.įirefighters fitted a harness around the construction worker’s waist.
#Stuck in quicksand free#
Brevard County Fire Rescue Special Operations firefighters work to free a man who fell into a pit at a construction site on Thursday, May 12, 2022.
The nozzle also “blew the vacuum from the earth,” Neidert said. With the nozzle jetting water beneath him, firefighters were finally able to see his legs and cut away the roots snarled around his boots. It’s like spearing a sprinkler head through a wall to battle a blaze, but in this case the spray was directed at pushing the encroaching muck away from the man. That’s equipment usually used by firefighters to spray water into a burning room from an adjacent space.
So they placed a piercing nozzle below his legs. “It all surrounded underneath him,” said Neidert. But he still wouldn’t budge because he was vacuum-sealed to the pit. They decided to use a second excavator to rake the water and quicksand away from the trapped man. “There are so many things going through your mind and you have to make sure that you’re not only keeping the patient safe but your crew safe.” Brevard County Fire Rescue Special Operations firefighters work to free a man who fell into a pit at a construction site on Thursday, May 12, 2022. “You’re trained to do it, but when it’s in real life, you want to make sure that you get him out safely and your crew,” Neidert said. Sheriff’s spokesperson Tod Goodyear said a dive team member luckily happened to be nearby and ran to the hole with a tank and respirator so “he could actually breathe.”īy the end of the afternoon, 37 firefighters and 12 sheriff’s deputies had flocked to the site, along with several county workers, all trying to blueprint a feasible rescue plan that didn’t get first responders killed.
#Stuck in quicksand full#
The Brevard County Sheriff’s Office gave the firefighters a full face shield scuba mask, which they put on the man’s head to keep him breathing as the water continued to rise. Brevard County Fire Rescue Special Operations firefighters work to free a man who fell into a pit on Thursday, May 12, 2022, at a construction site. “If you’re in Florida, and the water temperature is below 70, that is cold because your body is acclimated to a different temperature,” Neidert said. Neidert said the construction worker was in pain, shivering and suffering from shock, and had become hypothermic, but “the entire time he was awake, alert, oriented.” “You don’t have to go very far to find water, or mud, or muck when you’re digging in Florida,” Brevard County Fire Rescue Chief Pat Voltaire told Coffee or Die. The man was inching deeper into the quicksand.
The construction crew staged an excavator to hold the wall of the trench in place so that it wouldn’t cave in around the submerged man, but groundwater kept seeping into the seam faster than they could pump it out. An excavator scoops away quicksand and water from a pit in Florida’s Brevard County on Thursday, May 12, 2022.
In his struggle to break free, his boots had gotten tangled in the roots. Neidert said the man was searching for valuable coquina rocks around a 10-foot high spoil pile of dirt above the excavation, and “just slipped and fell into the hole.”Īnd he kept falling until he plopped onto some tree roots snaking through the sloppy sediment. When they did, they confronted a chasm about 40 feet wide and 15 feet in length. Davis Construction site of US Highway 1 near Camp Road, west of the Indian River, Neidert’s crew had to spend 20 minutes trying to find a trench inside a 100-acre site grown with brush. Davis Construction site off US Highway 1 near Cocoa. We couldn’t get him out.” A Brevard County Fire Rescue Special Operations crew assesses a very bad situation on Thursday, May 12, 2022, of a Florida man who toppled into a hole at a Jr. “I’m not kidding you, this guy was in quicksand,” Neidert told Coffee or Die Magazine. When the emergency responders found him, the 59-year-old Florida man was chin-deep in cold water, two stories down in the pit, and they weren’t exactly sure how they were going to get him out of the quicksand slurping at his neck.īrevard County Fire Rescue Special Operations District Chief Thomas Neidert described the muck they saw in the crater near Cocoa around noon on Thursday, May 12, as “sugar sand.”
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