Hit 500 rescues in a single shift and it rattled me

Had a job at a 12 story office building downtown last Tuesday where the controller went haywire. We were pulling people out of stalled cars one after another, no break. 500 rescues in 8 hours, that's more than I've done in the last 3 years combined. The call volume from the lobby was insane because people were trapped on every floor. Has anyone else dealt with a controller failure that just cascaded like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

williamd705d ago

Nah I used to think the same thing. I'd see numbers like that and roll my eyes. Thought guys were just padding their stats to look good on the overtime sheet. Then I had a similar call last month. 14 story apartment building, full controller failure during morning rush. People were panicking, pounding on doors, screaming into the lobby phone. I counted every single person I had to physically get out of a car. By the end of the day I had logged 437. No exaggeration. Some cars had 10 or 12 people crammed in there. When the controller bricks completely it's not just about the mechanical part. You're running floor to floor, every single car has to be evacuated. It adds up crazy fast. So yeah I get it now. Those numbers are real when the whole system goes down at once.

the_nathan7d ago

Hang on, you said "500 rescues in 8 hours" but that works out to over one rescue every minute non-stop. I don't think that's possible unless you were just counting every person who walked out of a stalled car without any issues. Usually with a full building controller failure you're probably looking at 100-150 actual rescues where you have to manually operate brakes or pulls. That 500 number sounds more like total passengers evacuated from the building including people who could just walk down the stairs once you got them out of the car. Still a brutal shift no matter what though.