PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — On a sunny but gusty day, police officers in harnesses dangled from ropes clamped to the suspension cables on the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, more than 300 feet above the Delaware River. It looked like high drama Wednesday, but it was only a monthly training exercise for the Delaware River Port Authority’s High Angle Rescue Team.
The HART squad’s Sgt. Jay Keefer says the monthly drills help keep his 24/7 crew conditioned for anyone’s crisis, at any height. “If a worker or someone in distress would need our assistance, we’d be trained to efficiently go up and bring them down safely.” Keefer told KYW Newsradio.
The job is part Spider-Man and part counselor.
“People sometimes want to do harm to themselves. And that’s our most frequent call, where we’ll go out and we’ll have to negotiate with them and talk them down,” Keefer said. “There have been a couple incidents where we had to resort to rope rescue to lower ourselves down to speak to the individual, put them in a harness and then actually haul them back up.”
Officers often have to dissuade people in distress from making an irreversible decision.
“When they’re in that moment of distress, the only thing they’re thinking about is resolving that issue,” Keefer explained. “If we can get them down and we can help them, it’s definitely beneficial for all of us.”
Keefer recalls one long negotiation two months ago on the Betsy Ross Bridge: “It was roughly about six hours that we had to talk with the individual and we finally got her to come back over, and it was very rewarding.”
The HART squad covers all four DRPA bridges. The Commodore Barry Bridge and Walt Whitman Bridge are the other two.
Keefer says the Commodore Barry and Betsy Ross pose special challenges: “They’re just a different type of bridge, and they don’t have the same structure as the Ben Franklin or Walt Whitman, where we can actually climb and get up on and things like that. It’s just more of a challenge.”
Keefer says there are seven active HART members, and there are plans to add two more next month.