New Canaan’s fire chief said last week that the recent death of a contractor doing excavation work on Valley Road has the department looking again at its rescue capabilities.
Though the department was at the job site at Silver Hill Hospital on Friday, Dec. 22 and pulled the man out in 15 minutes following a trench collapse, he perished from internal wounds sustained at the time of the accident, according to Fire Chief Albe Bassett.
The man “happened to be working on a fire protection line for one of their [the hospital’s] buildings which they—unfortunately—they can’t shut it off, so they were doing an emergency repair and the worker was struck and trapped by dirt inside the hole, about 12 feet down,” Bassett said during a special budget-related meeting of the Fire Commission, held Feb. 8 via videoconference.
That’s “a very challenging rescue for any fire service, but for us with lack of equipment and staffing it was much more difficult,” the fire chief said. “But we got him out in 15 minutes or so with the help of their contractors. Unfortunately he did perish.”
The comments came during a review of the Fire Department’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2025. Bassett identified some of the department’s goals for the year as “increase specialized rescue capabilities,” “improve water supply infrastructure and operations” and “enhance our firefighter health and safety.” Those present included the full Fire Commission—Chair Jack Horner, Secretary Kerry Smith and member Beth Jones—as well as Board of Finance liaisons Michael Chen, Colm Dobbyn and Robert Hamill.
Bassett’s description of the tragic events on Dec. 22 provided more detail than originally reported.
The fire chief noted that “there’s no rescue team that would have been able to save the individual.”
The man was working on a sprinkler/fire protection line that runs to the hospital’s “Main House,” “and the sprinkler system that protects the residents in there,” Bassett said.
“They were trying to make an emergency repair,” he said.
Hammil noted that the Fire Department would have been called in on a similar emergency at a building foundation or construction site, and that it just happened to be that the contractors at the hospital were doing fire-related work.
Bassett said, “The hard part for us to swallow is we were actually pulling up for a fire watch during it.”
That was “was good for us being there so fast,” he said, though “it didn’t really make a difference based on the injuries.”
“And we knew this already going in, that we are kind of limited in our equipment for an incident like that, but when we got on scene that fast, we were even more limited,” Bassett said. “So those are a couple of things we are looking at and how we can enhance operational-level stuff for those types of rescues.”