Two workers were in a window-washing basket on a high-rise building in Tysons, Virginia, when one side of it came loose, leaving them dangling precariously for at least an hour before they were rescued, according to the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department.
The department received a call about the incident in the 7900 block of Tysons One Place at around 9:15 a.m. Thursday, department spokesperson Ashley Hildebrandt said.
First responders lowered the workers down from the side of the building using a tower ladder bucket, a mechanism on the fire truck that extends an arm out with a bucket on the end to carry passengers. They were on the ground by 10:30 a.m., she said.
There were no injuries, Hildebrandt said. It is unclear what caused the scaffolding to become unmoored, she said.
The situation was “very surreal” to behold, said 28-year-old Brandon Matthews, who works in the building and was on the 15th floor at the time.
He first became aware of the situation when a person on the floor started talking about the side of a scaffold snapping. A few minutes later, a colleague stood up from their cubicle.
“There’s people hanging,” Matthews recalled his co-worker saying. “The window cleaners are stuck.”
He approached the window and saw the window-washing basket leaning off to one side. One worker was near the side still mostly upright and standing on the railing while the other was closer to the end tipped downward, Matthews said.
“We could see they were obviously worried. They were scared,” he said. “I was worried for them. … It was very hard to watch.”
Inside the building, firefighters congregated around the window, Matthews said. One had an ax.
Outside, a fire truck extended the arm all the way up. Even at its most extended, it was still about 30 feet away from the workers, Matthews estimated.
Eventually the firefighters guided the workers into the buckets and lowered them down, according to the department.
People working in the office thanked the firefighters as they left, Matthews said.
“It’s something that you would see in like Spider-Man or in a movie, expecting a superhero to come out and save them in some kind of way, and more or less, they did,” Matthews said.
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