AJ climbed up that Tuesday morning to perform maintenance on a 130-foot-tall sign next to Interstate 55 in Wilmington, Illinois. He never imagined the lift would fail and that he would be stranded in a space so narrow that he could not even stand up fully.
Firefighters arrived nearly three hours after the call, but their 100-foot ladders fell short. The sign had no rungs or internal structure to climb, so a normal rescue was impossible. The solution came from Joliet, 17 miles away: a specialized lift that finally brought him down, complete with a police escort.
AJ, as the worker identified himself on social media, spent six and a half hours swaying in the wind, gradually becoming dehydrated, until a coworker called for emergency help. He ended up in a hospital, but before leaving he managed to smile and give a thumbs-up to the cameras. “The news coverage ultimately made it look like a walk in the park”, he would later say. “After the adrenaline wore off, I felt awful all night, and I still do.”