Navy man from Miami helps rescue woman who fell way down in the snowplow-created hole
Whom do you call when a woman’s in peril after snow and a snowplow create a dangerous situation in a street? A Navy man from Miami, of course.
That’s Master-at-Arms First Class Lorenzo Bell, a midnight shift watch commander onboard at the Naval Submarine Base New London, who proved rather adept at quick action on March 2, according to a Navy news release.
Bell and his wife were watching television in their Wakefield, Massachusetts, home when they thought they heard someone screaming. Upon hearing the screaming a third time, Bell told the Navy, they followed their ears.
“We started looking for the screaming and we found the woman at the bottom of a manhole with rushing cold water flowing,” Bell said. “I then ran to my Jeep and grabbed some rope. I made a loop and threw it down to the woman and told her to put it under her arms and around her body.”
Bell told passersby to call 911. He saw she might be hurt in ways a solo effort at hauling her out might exacerbate.
“The woman seemed to be injured from the fall,” Bell told the Navy. “She couldn’t move one of her legs and it also looked like she had injured both ankles.”
So, Bell just held onto her by the rope until fire rescue arrived.
“A public works officer told me the manhole cover on our street should have been replaced 10 years ago because it was from the 1970s and had raised studs on it,” Bell said. “That day, after it had finished snowing, a snowplow truck had come down our street and caught the cover with the plow and, unknowingly, dragged it several feet away.”
That left an open hole the woman didn’t see until she fell in and, in the plunge, her cellphone got left on the street.
Wakefield Public Works replaced the manhole cover that day, Bell said.
This story was originally published April 10, 2019 at 7:44 PM.
