Last week, the Guilford (Connecticut) Police and Fire Department made a crazy, once in a lifetime rescue.
A new tenant was moving into a home build in 1843 and he got quite the surprise when the floor in the living room gave way and was sent free falling nearly 30-feet down a well, into icy cold water.
The man who fell said the following in an interview with the local news.
“Chris and his lovely wife, Angie, were bringing over some furniture and I was pretty much done with everything,” said Diane Martin of Guilford.
Or so she thought.
A friend was tasked with setting up a bed in a room in a room that’s part of the house, which had been added on roughly 40 years ago.
“So,I hear a crack and I looked down and the floor is giving way underneath me and then I’m falling, and I’m falling,” said Dr. Christopher Town, who fell into the home’s well.
An addition to the home had been build over the well and no sub-flooring had ever been installed.
“And I’m thinking, ‘How the hell am I gonna get out of here,'” Town said with a smile.
Fortunately, his wife saw him disappear.
“And she said ‘are you OK and I said yeah,” Town said. “And she said ‘I think I will call 911. And I said that’s a good idea.'” 13:47:19
Originally, his wife thought he fell into a basement.
The water was roughly 7 feet deep.
The fire department had this to say.
“They quickly lowered a life jacket, a life safety rope, so that the gentleman could stay secured and not go under if you had anything medically going wrong,” said Assistant Fire Chief Michael Shove of the Guilford Fire Department.
“The fire department was incredibly professional,” Town noted. “They did a wonderful job and saved my life basically. It’s not a certainty that I would’ve died down there, but I was getting more and more hypothermic.”
And, amazingly, he suffered only very minor injuries.