Two men were working on a gondola outside a Housing Board block in Pasir Ris when several cables on one side of their working platform gave way, causing the gondola to tip precariously towards the ground.
Left dangling in mid-air outside the seventh storey, the quick-thinking men leapt into the nearby stairwell of the block and survived the unexpected danger.
If not, and if the other cables had given way, the men, both migrant workers, could have fallen some 20m to the ground, a potentially life-threatening drop.
This is the second such incident in five weeks involving a faulty gondola endangering the lives of workers. The Ministry of Manpower is looking into the incident, which happened around 9:30am on Wednesday at Block 708 Pasir Ris Drive.
The workers were indeed lucky that they thought and moved fast. The loosened cables left the gondola in an almost vertical position.
Shin Min Daily News reported that the gondola had been placed outside the HDB block on Tuesday, as workers had been tasked to put nets in place to deter birds from building their nests in the area.
However, while the two men were at work the following morning outside the building’s seventh floor, the cables on the right side of the platform got loose and the gondola tilted at an alarming angle, with its right end at the sixth storey level.
A video of the gondola’s near-vertical position can be seen on the Shin Min Daily News Facebook page. A resident who was there when the incident happened said that some of the materials the workers had been using fell to the ground. Fortunately, the men had the presence of mind to escape into the stairwell.
Neither was injured, but both were taken to hospital for a medical evaluation.
A spokesman for the town council said that the incident was reported to MOM, mothership reported. The spokesman said they were uncertain about why the cables came loose.
On Feb 18, a similar incident occurred, but in when two workers painting the exterior of an apartment block in Punggol were left dangling in mid-air when the cable of theri gondola suddenly snapped.
It happened at around 4pm at Block 176D Edgefield Plains in Punggol, and \was captured on video by a woman who lives in Punggol. It showed that a cable or cables seemed to have dislodged and loosened, leaving the gondola at a precarious angle. 16 storeys above ground
Those workers also escaped injury or worse because residents of the building witnessed the mishap, recognised the danger and opened their windows to help the workers inside, Shin Min Daily News reported at the time.
/TISG
Gondola cable snaps, leaving workers painting Punggol flats suspended at 16th-floor