Firefighters performed a rope rescue to retrieve a man who fell more than 15 metres down a near-vertical embankment in Nanaimo on Wednesday.
Nanaimo Fire Rescue responded shortly after 4 p.m. when they were called to at property at 5450 Bayshore Dr., in north Nanaimo, where a man who had been working on a staircase had fallen and broken his leg.
“He fell about 50 feet and it was a fairly steep embankment, almost vertical, but he landed on a section about two feet wide by three feet long that was flat,” said Martin Drakeley, Nanaimo Fire Rescue assistant fire chief.
Drakeley said the victim broke his femur in the fall, but noted that beyond the ledge the man landed on, the embankment drops nearly another 50 metres.
“He was lucky,” Drakeley said.
The man was working on what Drakeley described as an “elaborate staircase” that allows access to the beach behind the property.
“Ambulance arrived on scene and they had to administer medications because he was in so much pain. Once they stabilized him, we packed him up in a Stokes [rescue basket] and did vertical lift because it was too precarious, so we did a vertical lift with our rope team and got him out that way,” Drakeley said.
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