/ 19 September 2008

‘Happy birthday, mom’ — from 70 storeys up

A window installer plucked from a scaffold as it teetered about 70 storeys above a Manhattan street in New York says he called his mother while he was waiting to be rescued.

Dan Sandler told the Daily News: ”I didn’t tell her where I was. I just said, ‘Happy birthday.”’

It took firefighters about 30 minutes on Thursday to rescue Sandler and fellow worker Tommy Florio at the 78-floor Metropolitan Tower condominiums in Midtown after one of the brakes failed on their scaffold and it tilted in midair.

Said Florio: ”It was scary — I’m not going to lie.”

After their rescue they went to lunch, then returned to work to repair a window broken during the rescue. — Sapa-AP