Emergency Responders Saving Man Mere Moments Ago At Downtown Houston Construction Site — UPDATED

(Warning: if you read far enough into this post, you will very probably groan at the horror you encounter...)

I turned on the TV to fill the time it took me to eat breakfast/lunch (not fancy enough to call it "brunch") and immediately happened upon breaking news: at an office building construction site in downtown Houston at the corner of Main St. and Texas Ave., an emergency crew was using some sort of crane-and-pulleys arrangement to lift a stretcher containing a man who had fallen, apparently into the deep hole in which the building will eventually be built. The man was strapped securely into the stretcher, which looked more suited to an ancient Egyptian mummy; the main cable(s) lifted the stretcher painstakingly slowly, while two yellow ropes attached to the head and foot ends of the stretcher served to stabilize the stretcher so that it didn't gyrate wildly.

The fixed screen caption read something like "Construction Site, Downtown Houston, Main & Texas." The news announcer, who was understandably repeating herself quite a lot because no one had provided her any more information than the rest of us had, kept saying, "You can see the two yellow ropes attached to the ends of the stretcher." Her repeated remark made me realize I'd seen this show before, and I even knew the theme song...





Wait for it...

The Yellow Ropes at Texas.

(Oh, groooaaannn!)

When I left the screen scene, the crew had the man back at ground level and were preparing to load him into an ambulance. I'll report more when I know more, but the good news is that one thing Houston has in great abundance, packed full and running over, is hospitals.

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UPDATE Wed. morning 2/18, apparently from yesterday afternoon's Click2Houston news: the man was taken to Memorial Hermann Hospital (that's where I had my surgery done two years ago), and although there hasn't been a formal report of the worker's condition or announcement of his name, the consensus of people who saw him right after his fall from a crane is that his injuries were not serious and he was alert and responsive. Good... I'd hate to be laughing at his expense if he had been seriously hurt. One of many things I liked about my occupation in my working years is that it involved neither dangerous heights nor precarious balancing acts... well, there were those occasionally tense meetings with the bosses...