By Sadie Gurman
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
BUTLER COUNTY, Pa. — Under dense fog, a pair of rescuers scaled the narrow rungs of an electrical utility tower yesterday to save two Butler County men who got stranded there after an early morning climb.
Scott Tucker, 22, suffered a broken leg when he plummeted about 20 feet from one level of the tower to a crossbeam 65 feet from the ground. Police said his friend, Leonard Teuteberg, 23, climbed the 130-foot tower — located behind a fabricating company on Kittanning Street — and clung to it until help arrived.
Help, in this case, came from South Butler firefighters Bob Barbarini, 48, and Justin “Squirrel” Simons, 21, who had been training for a “tower rescue” for years.
“This was our first real one,” Mr. Barbarini said.
When they arrived about 4 a.m., Mr. Simons said, Mr. Tucker was “yelling in pain,” lying on the support beam.
“His buddy was trying to help us calm him down,” he said.
“He wanted to climb down, but we weren’t going to let that happen,” Mr. Barbarini said.
Instead, the firefighters climbed the rung, and strapped a harness around the uninjured Mr. Teuteberg, then “rigged up a lowering system” using ropes to pull him to the ground, where a crowd of emergency personnel and police were helping.
When Mr. Teuteberg was safely down, Mr. Simons crawled out to the center of the tower on the narrow metal beams to rescue Mr. Tucker, he said.
“You’re standing on three-inch beams, and you don’t have a lot of footing,” he said. “I crawled out to the center, put a harness on him, and hauled him back to the edge,” of the tower. Then, Mr. Simons said, he lifted Mr. Tucker over a beam to get him out of the tower.
Mr. Tucker was taken to Butler Memorial Hospital, where he was treated yesterday for a broken leg and an ankle injury. A hospital spokesman said he was later released.
Trespassing charges are pending against both men, who share a home on Zeigler Avenue in Butler.
The rescue took firefighters about two hours, despite pleas from the men to go faster, Mr. Barbarini said.
Unlike fires, he said, tower rescues aren’t “the normal, respond with 50 people, put the wet stuff on the red stuff and you’re done,” he said. “They don’t happen in 10 minutes. They take time.”
Mr. Barbarini knows; a firefighter in South Butler and Saxonburg, he has been teaching classes on tower rescues, cave rescues, water rescues and rope rescues nearly every weekend for 15 years. And Mr. Simons has been helping with those classes when he can.
“I love doing rope stuff. I’ve done all this training,” he said. “I’m just glad that it finally paid off.”
Copyright 2009 P.G. Publishing Co.