Two tourists who planned to engage in outdoor adventure on a beach in Kerala were horrified when their parachute didn't land where it was supposed to. A man and a woman who were paragliding at Papanasham Beach in Varkala, a rural area of Thiruvananthapuram, were stuck in a pole after their parachute became tangled with it.
The video of this unfortunate event is going viral on social media. It shows that the electric pole has several high-voltage lights placed on top, and the two paragliders are trying not to fall from the more than 50-foot-tall pole.
According to the news agency PTI, the two people were left hanging from the pole for nearly two hours before being rescued. As the fire department did not have a ladder that was tall enough, the rescue plan was to lower the columns of the high mast to bring them to safety, and as a precautionary measure, mattresses and nets were placed at the bottom of the pole, police said.
Thereafter, the pole was lowered, and the 28-year old woman and the paragliding instructor were rescued, police said. Both of them have been admitted to the Taluk Hospital in Varkala and are safe, the police said.
This is not the first time that paragliding incidents have turned into horrifying accidents. Last year in December, two men died in two separate paragliding incidents in the country within 24 hours. A 50-year-old South Korean man died after falling 50 feet to the ground while paragliding in Gujarat's Mehsana district, while a 30-year-old tourist from Maharashtra fell to his death while paragliding in the Dobhi area of Kullu district in Himachal Pradesh.
