Parachute into a tree? Lumbee River EMC can help

You might be surprised if headquarters said to drive your bucket truck to the woods to help rescue a pair of paratroopers. But to Lumbee River EMC veterans Derek Owens and George Huggins, it’s old hat.

“Normally, when I get that call, it’s ‘here we go again,’” said Owens, coordinator of contract services at the Robeson County electric co-op where he’s a 14-year veteran. “I would say 90 percent of our linemen have done it at least one time,” he added, estimating that Lumbee River gets about one call like this a year.

“We have a small airport in Raeford where the military does practice jumps,” said Owens. Sure enough, this call was about a mile from there.

Sometimes the paratroopers land on a power line; sometimes it’s in a tree. “Thankfully, this time they were just in a tree,” said Owens. So he and Huggins were ready when they got the call March 10.

A 16-year Lumbee River veteran who is supervisor of maintenance services, George Huggins arrived first and began scoping out a path. “I went down this long, hilly, dusty old dirt road, and you start seeing rescue units in the distance,” he recalled. As he got closer, he saw rescue workers standing by the first paratrooper, who was sitting on a limb. “He was actually in a better position than the one farthest away.”

Farther away, Huggins could see a fire truck’s lights flashing. He finally made it another 200 yards where he found the second paratrooper “about as far back in the middle of the woods as you can get, hung up in a pine tree.”

Huggins described that man as having “gotten suspended in such a way that he had free hung for about two hours” until he was able to “wiggle himself over to a limb and shimmy down maybe 10 or 15 feet from the top of the pine before we got there.”

When Owens arrived, he, too, proceeded to the second paratrooper. “We set the truck up, boomed up and got him down,” he said. Then they went back to retrieve the first man.

Neither paratrooper was hurt, except perhaps for pride. “They were thankful,” Owens said. “I’m sure they were embarrassed — they didn’t want to talk a whole lot.”

As Huggins laughed, “I think their buddies had given them enough.”