Firefighters rescue man stuck in chimney
January 1, 2020
Firefighters were called out to a house in central Germany where a man had become stuck in a chimney after a night of revelry.
The 18-year-old was trapped for three hours, wearing only light clothes, before his friends alerted authorities at 4:30 a.m. on New Year's Day.
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The group had been celebrating the start of 2020 at the house, a rented vacation property in the southern Harz mountains of central Germany. The man left at some point and attempted to climb the 15-meter (50-foot) chimney.
Other party-goers had no idea where the man had gone and only called emergency services after searching for him and hearing him cry for help. The man's upper body was poking out of the chimney when rescue workers arrived.
More than 40 emergency service staff attended the scene, the newspaper Mitteldeutsche Zeitung reported. In the end, the man was able to pull his arms out of the chimney.
"We don't know how or why the man got there," a police spokeswoman said.
The overnight temperature in the neighborhood was about minus 4 degrees Celsius (25 degrees Fahrenheit), and the man was treated at a nearby hospital for hypothermia.