Two Window Washers Rescued 12 Stories Up

Two high-rise window washers dangled 12 stories above Hollywood for half an hour Tuesday after a steel beam supporting their mechanized scaffold broke and nearly sent them tumbling to the pavement below.

David O’Dell, 33, and Frank Butler, 44, clung to their precarious perch until firefighters broke through a 12th-floor office window and brought them inside to safety.

“It was one weird experience,” Butler said after being treated for a badly cut knee at Queen of Angels/Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center.

O’Dell was not injured, although he was visibly shaken from the experience as he waited for Butler in the hospital emergency room.

“I’m going back to driving,” said O’Dell, a part-time truck driver. “This death-defying stuff . . . I’m through with it.”

The accident occurred just before 11:30 a.m. as O’Dell and Butler were descending the west side of the Hollywood Center building at 6922 Hollywood Blvd.

The men had already washed one set of windows that morning and had moved the mechanized scaffold over to wash the next set.

O’Dell, a window washer for eight years, said the scaffold had just started to descend when he felt a jolt that dropped one end about three feet.

“It was like the bottom just fell out,” O’Dell said. “I just kept thinking: ‘Lights out, curtains, the end.’ ”

O’Dell grabbed the scaffold’s railing and looked up at the broken steel support that was snagged on the outside of the building. The support anchors a steel cable that runs down the side of the building and holds up the scaffold.

“That thing was just hanging on,” O’Dell said.

Butler, the owner of Prestige Window Cleaning, was on the other end of the scaffold when the arm broke and he slid a few feet to a corner of the scaffold.

Butler said he tried to get up to climb a rope up to the top of the building, but O’Dell yelled at him: “Don’t shake! Don’t move!”

They sat motionless as they waited for help to arrive.

“I felt every second,” O’Dell said. “You fall from 12 stories and there’s nothing to catch.”

The incident occurred in front of the 12th-floor office of Bob Chasin, a vice president with Fries Entertainment.

Chasin was stunned when he heard the scaffold crash against the building, sending buckets of water and window washing brushes against his office window.

Chasin quickly scribbled a note on a piece of paper and held it up to Butler on the other side of the window: “Calling Fire Department.”

As the two men waited, O’Dell looked down at the crowd of onlookers scurrying far below him.

One bystander yelled up to him: “Are you guys all right?”

O’Dell yelled back: “No!”

Firefighters arrived in a few minutes and secured the broken steel arm with high-strength rope, Fire Capt. Rick Garcia said.

Then they broke through Chasin’s office window and brought the two men inside.

O’Dell said he and Butler traded relieved looks and then gave each other a quick salute.

In the hospital emergency room, Butler said he has no plans to quit the window washing business that he has been in for 17 years. In fact, Butler said he intends to go back and finish cleaning the windows on the Hollywood Center building as soon as his leg heals.

“This isn’t going to change the pattern of my business,” he said. “Life goes on.”