Midlife crisis? 53-year-old crawled in pipe for 'adventure'

NASHVILLE — A 53-year-old whom emergency personnel rescued after spending four days stuck in an 18-inch drainage pipe told authorities that he was being adventurous when he crawled into the storm drain.

The man, whose name was not released, was heard crying for help during a swim meet Sunday at the Centennial Sportsplex Tennis Center, said Larry McCown, a Nashville-Davidson County Fire Department engineer. A passerby realized the cries came from the nearby storm pipe and flagged a police officer, who then alerted the fire department.

"We used our flashlights from our cellphones and we could see him, but he was back in the pipeline a good ways, probably about 10 feet," Brian Williams, who found a policeman around 12:30 p.m. CT Sunday, told WKRN-TV, Nashville.

After arriving on the scene, McCown recalled a similar situation from a ride-along he had done in New York City and decided to climb down to the stuck man to keep him calm during the removal process.

"I climbed in as far as I could go, which was 6 to 7 feet from him, and I told him we would get him out," McCown said. "He told me that he was in there because he'd 'always been adventurous.' I said he should try a new adventure next time."

He had entered the storm drain Thursday on Charlotte Avenue.

While McCown kept the man calm and explained everything firefighters were doing to retrieve him, he said the man was "fatigued and didn't want to talk a lot."

The man was wedged in a bend of the storm pipe with his left arm and shoulder extended toward the end of the pipe, but he couldn't move his body from the waist down. McCown said the man looked as if "he had been in a lot of dust and dirt recently."

When small debris fell on the man as firefighters worked to free him, McCown told him not to worry.

"What people are afraid of in life is the unknown, so I was just reassuring him that this was the way it is," McCown said. "I guess he did as well as he could being stuck in an 18-inch pipe."

While firefighters attempted to pull the man out, McCown passed the man a canister of oxygen and a mask for him to use. He was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment and expected to make a full recovery.

Minutes after his rescue, it started raining.

"I never told him we were about to get him out because I didn't want to give him false hope," McCown said. "I had the easy part. The real hard, exhausting work was by the crew with the sledgehammers and hydraulic tools."