Shaky scaffold, language barrier complicated rescue

It was a nerve-wracking two hours Thursday afternoon for two painters stranded on a scaffold high above the streets of downtown Atlanta — and their rescuers.

Atlanta Fire & Rescue received a call at 5:45 p.m. Thursday after part of the scaffold collapsed near the top of the 16-story University Place at Underground Atlanta apartment building at 54 Peachtree St.

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CURTIS COMPTON / ccompton@ajc.com

A firefighter drops a rope to one of two workers trapped on a scaffolding suspended from an Atlanta building.

• Photos: Workers rescued from scaffold

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No injuries were reported, but rescuers say the situation was tenuous on the platform where the workers were stranded.

“It was moving the whole time,” said Firefighter George Nour, a rescuer who brought one of the trapped workers down.

The apartment building, at Peachtree and Alabama streets directly above Underground Atlanta, is home to many college students.

Kinghezekiah Rashid, a barber at the Legends Barber Shop at Underground Atlanta, said he heard something snap — “sort of like a gunshot.” He came outside, looked up and saw two workers standing on the platform, holding onto ropes.

Rescuers say the scaffolding that malfunctioned lodged into the building’s stucco, perhaps saving the Spanish-speaking painters’ lives.

About 7 p.m., a firefighter was lowered to the platform, where he attached himself with a harness to one of the workers. The two then rappelled down to the roof of the two-story Waffle House next to University Place.

“The biggest thing was getting them [the painters] calmed down,” Nour said. Neither of the workers spoke English.

But Firefighter Stephen Webb, who brought the second man down, found some common ground as he worked to attach a harness to the man. Speaking through a translator on the roof, “he told me his wife was having another child,” said Webb, who recently became a father.

The rescue took about two hours to complete and was finished just as high winds began blowing through downtown.