AN AWKWARD PREDICAMENT.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume I, Issue 136, 25 May 1911, Page 11

AN AWKWARD PREDICAMENT.

MAN FAINTS ON FACTORY CHIMNEY. Berlin. April 13. Shortly before twelve o’clock last night belated pedestrians hurrying homewards along the streets known as Old Moabit were arrested in their course by loud shouts of help that seemed to come from the skies. They looked up in curious astonishment, and presently saw the figure of a man silhouetted against the moonlit sky at the top of a factory chimney 150 ft. high. He continued his cries for assistance, and. amid his gesticulations, pointed at some object lying at his feet. The crowd, which rapidly collected, realised that something untoward had happened, and rang up the fire brigade—the invariable succourer in all novel predicaments. When the firemen succeeded in making their way to the summit of the chimney, they found that the man who had been appealing so pitifully for help was indeed in an awkward fix. With a fellow workman he had been ordered to remove the weather cock which crowned the structure, and had recently shown signs of falling. As the chimnev was in use during the

day, they had been obliged to un-

dertake the task late at night, after the furnaces had been extinguished and the flue had had time to cool down a little. They had reached the top by a series of steps provided in the interior of the structure. But the chimney was still hot, and the stifling temI perature, combined with soot and dust, was too much for one of them, and as he emerged on the narrow coping he collapsed in an unconscious heap. His mate had feared to descend for help, thinking that, in the uneasy movements of coming to himself, the prostrate I man might roll from his narrow couch into the abyss below. It was no easy task, even for the fire brigade, to rescue the sick man i immense rope was painfully hauled i up the huge shaft, and run round i a pulley attached to the scaffold- | I ing that supported the weather- ; cock. To this rope he w r as fastened, ' and by its means carefully lowered down the middle of the chimney, ’t was half-past one before he was on firm ground once more.