Window cleaner Marcel and his colleague Dave were stuck for more than two hours at a height of thirty meters on the facade of a TU building in Eindhoven on Tuesday afternoon. “It was not pleasant, in such a small container in the burning sun and in the wind.” When the men pressed the button to go down at around 2am, nothing happened. The fire service eventually had to free them.
Marcel is overjoyed when he has solid ground under his feet again. As a window cleaner he has been stuck before, but never so long and so high. It was a long time, sitting together in such a container for a few hours, says Marcel. The men passed the time talking, calling and looking down. Marcel wasn’t afraid, but it was fun: “I don’t like small spaces and then you want to get out and that’s not possible. Fortunately, we got water from the fire brigade.”
“I’m glad to be back on my feet again.”
His younger colleague Dave looks back on it mainly soberly: “I think when you’re older you worry more about it.” Dave wasn’t afraid either: “A firefighter isn’t afraid of fire either. It was very hot upstairs, so I’m glad to have my feet firmly on the ground again.”
Dave spent a lot of time upstairs calling the mechanics, the university’s technical department, and the fire department. “It was quite a circus downstairs,” says his colleague Marcel. Because the window cleaners who were imprisoned attracted many students who came to have a look. “Normally I pay for an attraction and now it was me myself,” he says with a laugh.
“Do some internal work tomorrow. That’s better for me.”
The men will just go back to work tomorrow: “But not into the air for a while, but inside work. That’s a bit better for me now,” says Marcel. But as soon as it is necessary, he just goes back into the air: “We are here all year round and it will have to be.” Colleague Dave will first recover at home with a cold beer and tomorrow he will also get back to work.
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