Abseiling firefighters rescue man after fall from Leiden flour factory

On Thursday morning firefighters from Leiden and Utrecht teamed up to rescue a man that fell from the former flour factory in Leiden and ended meters down, on the 12th story of another building, the Telegraaf reports. The injured man was in a hard to read place at a height of about 70 meters. He could not be reached with ladders. And as the building is full of "crawl-through, sneak-through" areas, using a stretcher was impossible. A specialist high altitude team from Utrecht was eventually called in. Firefighters abseiled down to the victim and rappelled him down. An ambulance took him to a hospital to be treated for a broken leg and hypothermia. During the night the man and a friend broke into the closed down flour factory and climbed to the roof. They wanted to take photographs of Leiden by night. The man fell around 4:30 a.m. The second person was unharmed. The flour factory is located in an industrial complex on the corner of Oossterkerkstraat and Zijlsingel in Leiden. It consists of 13 buildings, including a boiler house, silos, flour processing buildings, a warehouse and an office with staff housing and bicycle storage.