A crane operator suffered a medical emergency roughly 220 feet in the air yesterday at the construction site of JPS Health Network’s new hospital tower, prompting a technical rope rescue by Fort Worth firefighters that ended with the worker being lowered safely and taken to a hospital in stable condition. The Fort Worth Fire Department Alarm Office received the call just before noon, dispatching crews to 1300 South Main Street, where the patient was found inside a crane cab more than 22 stories above the ground.
According to the Fort Worth Fire Department, rescue crews began immediate emergency medical care upon reaching the operator, and the incident commander requested the department’s special Technical Rescue Team to carry out a high-angle response. That team climbed the crane’s ladder with rescue equipment, then devised a plan for the operator’s safe descent using ropes and a rigging system. The entire rescue operation, from the moment crews reached the patient to the operator’s arrival on solid ground, took less than an hour.
A Familiar Scene Above the Same Job Site
Yesterday’s rescue was not the first time this year that a crane operator has needed emergency extraction from high above the same construction zone. As reported by CBS News Texas, it marks the second time in under four months that Fort Worth firefighters have responded to a crane operator suffering a medical emergency roughly 220 feet above the same JPS Health campus, following a nearly identical incident on May 6.
During that earlier rescue, the fire department’s Tactical Rescue Team rotated the crane’s counterweight and lowered the operator to the roof of an adjacent, newly built parking garage using a specialized rope rigging system, according to FOX 4 News. It remains unclear whether the same crane unit, contractor, or crane subcontractor was involved in both the May and August emergencies, and the dossier does not specify whether heat played any role in Saturday’s incident.
Massive Cranes Tower Over a $1.5 Billion Hospital Project
The reason such towering cranes loom over South Main Street traces back to JPS Health Network’s sweeping campus expansion. The site is the location of the health system’s $1.5 billion new inpatient hospital tower, which officially broke ground on April 16 and is not expected to be finished until 2030, per KERA News. The scale of the project explains why cranes reaching well over 200 feet have become a fixture of the skyline near the hospital…