Crews rescue 2 from hot-air balloon entangled on Texas communications tower

LONGVIEW, Texas (AP) — Crews in East Texas rescued two people stranded hundreds of feet in the air after a hot-air balloon became entangled on a communications tower over the weekend.

Firefighters responding to the tower on Saturday morning found the balloon entangled more than 900 feet (274 meters) above the ground, according to officials in Longview, a city of more than 80,000 about 120 miles (193 kilometers) east of Dallas.

The complex, hourslong rescue involved more than a dozen firefighters stationed at various heights along the tower. It took them about an hour to climb up to the man and woman in the balloon’s basket and to give them ropes and harnesses to help them escape.

It was another hour before they were secured inside the tower and could begin their descent, which took nearly two more hours, Longview Fire Marshal Marcus Delaney said at a news conference. Both were taken to a hospital as a precaution, Delaney said.

Images and video from the scene show the balloon’s multicolored fabric ripped in places and wound around the guidewire and tower with the basket hanging below. Each balloonist can be seen climbing out of the basket in a harness and swinging over to the tower to the waiting rescuers.

“I think they felt better once we had harnesses on them,” Lt. Stephen Winchell said at a news conference after the rescue, noting that the basket was swaying in the breeze.

“As we teach rope classes, this is exactly one of the scenarios we talk about as kind of the Super Bowl of rope rescue,” Winchell said. They’ve talked before about the logistical challenges posed by this tower, one of the tallest in the area, and what to do if a hot-air balloon gets stuck in a power line or a tree.

“We just didn’t expect today that both of those scenarios would get combined into one very tall rescue,” he said.

The Federal Aviation Administration said Monday that it will investigate the incident involving the Cameron Z-77 balloon.