MBTA workers save man who fell onto Orange Line tracks

By Andrew Ryan, Globe Staff

The MBTA lauded two sheet metal workers today who leaped down onto the Orange Line at North Station, ran over the electrified third rail, and saved an unconscious man who had fallen onto the tracks.

The man in his 50s was stumbling and unsteady on his feet at 1 p.m. last Friday when he fell off the platform and dropped some 5 feet onto the tracks. One of his arms came to rest inches from the 600-volt third rail.

"I said we have to get this guy," said A.J. Pugliese Jr., 40, today in an interview. "Yeah, I was a little scared … but your adrenaline is going."

Pugliese and fellow sheet metal worker, Robert Johnson, 39, heard pleas for help from riders on the platform on the other side of the tracks and sprang into action. The pair had been in the station replacing Plexiglas that covers maps of the T.

When the sheet metal workers reached the man on the tracks, Pugliese said, they moved his arm away from the third rail, flopping it onto this chest. One of his shoes had came off in the fall.

"He was just passed out like, laying completely in the middle of the tracks," Pugliese said. "I jumped down and ran over and was just making sure he was breathing."

The man was pulled off the tracks, lifted onto the platform, and taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was treated and released, said spokesman Joe Pesaturo for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

"It's extraordinary that they would put themselves in harm's way to help this man," Pesaturo said.

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