An injured construction worker on the Wyndham Grand Resort on Clearwater Beach needed a high flying technical rescue operation to get him to safety.
"Because it’s a construction site... they don’t really have any stairs or any elevators," said Eric Miller with Clearwater Fire & Rescue. "We had to do a high angle rescue to get him down."
Miller was the Special Operations firefighter who could be seen dangling from the basket that lowered the construction worker, Michael Stivers, 53, to the ground from the fourth floor of the hotel Thursday morning.
"We went up like another 20-feet to make sure we cleared everything," Miller said. "You could tell he really didn’t want to be up there."
Miller said he talked to Stivers during the slow moving operation to try and calm his nerves.
"I was like, ‘Okay buddy, how you doing?’ He’s like, ‘I’m hurting a little bit. We need to hurry up and get down.’ 'We’re going to be down soon,'" Miller said. "Just coax him through. Let him know that he’s okay. He’s strapped in pretty good. We’re not going to let anything happen to him."
Stivers told firefighters that he was injured when he tripped and fell at the construction site.
"Seemed like he hurt his ankle," said Miller. "He hurt his shoulder."
Once on the ground, Stivers was taken to Bayfront Medical Center with non-life threatening injuries. Miller said they had just trained for this exact scenario three months ago.
"It was very, I guess you could say, fulfilling to be able to help the guy get down," he said. "Not afraid of heights. So, it really wasn’t a big deal for me.
The Wyndham Grand Resort is scheduled to open in early 2017.