The Brussels fire brigade and emergency services were called to the Brussels suburb of Jette on Monday to free a 20-year-old man from a bottle bank. The young man survived the ordeal of being stuck in the subterranean container with only a few scratches to show.
‘The twenty-something had crawled into the bottle bank to look for his father's keys, which had accidentally fallen into the container,’ explained fire brigade spokesman Walter Derieuw. ‘The first ambulance crew on the scene used a crowbar to enlarge the opening of the bottle bank and were able to free the unlucky guy from his predicament.’
"For sure we were pretty surprised when we arrived. Someone getting stuck in a bottle bank was a first for us. We sometimes have to pull people out of clothes containers, or a septic tank, but this was a first. A few years ago, we did have to rescue a woman from a well in the garden of a Brussels mansion."
So what should you do when you drop something into a bottle bank? ‘It's best to contact the operator, in this case Net Brussel, the waste agency.’
The man who got stuck only sustained a few scratches and did not have to attend a hospital. ‘It was all a storm in a glass of water,’ Mr Derieuw noted.