A Brooklyn man trapped deep inside a narrow upstate New York cave passage was rescued early Sunday after forest rangers spent six hours trying to free him from a rock crevice that pinned his body in place.
The man became stuck while exploring Merlin’s Cave in Canaan, Columbia County on Saturday night, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
Forest Ranger Lt. John Gullen said the man slipped while crawling through a notoriously tight section of the cave system known as the “Bear Trap,” falling into a narrow crevice roughly 400 feet from the entrance.
“The rock is slippery and he just had a slip in the wrong spot,” Gullen said in a video released by the DEC. “As he tried to get out, he just got wedged further down to the point that he was immobilized.”
When rescuers arrived about 9 p.m., the man’s three friends had already spent hours unsuccessfully trying to pull him free while attempting to keep him warm inside the cold, wet cave.
“It was like his full body was stuck in a crevice that was basically designed the exact shape of him,” Gullen said.
The trapped man, who was not identified by the DEC, was pinned by his rib cage and pelvis and beginning to suffer from hypothermia, officials said. Temperatures inside the cave hovered around 50 degrees with nearly 100% humidity.
Gullen and members of the National Cave Rescue Commission initially tried manually extracting the man using webbing and rope techniques. But rescuers eventually realized a small section of rock had to be removed before the man could move.
Crews brought in a hammer drill and carefully chipped away at the rock surrounding the trapped caver.
“I was prepared for this to potentially take days,” Gullen said in the interview.
Instead, after roughly 20 minutes of drilling and breaking apart the rock, rescuers were finally able to free the man.
“That was all it took,” Gullen said. “Then we were able to get the subject to shimmy his way up from his entrapment.”
Photos released by the DEC show the man tightly wedged inside the muddy rock crevice while rescuers worked in the cramped underground space.
Despite spending hours trapped underground, the man remained calm throughout the ordeal, according to Gullen.
“For most people, that’s like their worst nightmare,” he said. “He did such a great job keeping a positive attitude. We were telling jokes.”
The man was given warm food and fluids after the rescue and walked out of the cave on his own shortly after 2 a.m. Sunday. Officials said he was not seriously injured.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Brooklyn man rescued from tight New York cave
Reporting by Ryan Miller, New York Connect Team / Rockland/Westchester Journal News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
