Man recovers after being pinned under two ton boulder

An excavator from Black Forest is recovering after being pinned under a massive boulder for nearly an hour and a half.

It happened Monday afternoon on Brandywine Drive in the Broadmoor Bluffs neighborhood of Colorado Springs.

The Colorado Springs Fire Department estimates the 5-foot by 5-foot boulder weighed two tons.

The man, 63-year-old Edward Bueshel, was trying to fix a water line and was down in a large hole standing on a ladder. The boulder in the ground next to him fell and pinned his feet and lower legs.

“(The boulder) was quite flat on the back which, when you dig enough around it, it’s going to tip and fall,” said CSFD spokeswoman Sunny Smaldino, who called what happened a “one in a million” type of occurrence.

It took rescuers an hour and twenty minutes to dig around him and cut off the top and bottom parts of the ladder and pull him out.

“He was calm, he was moving,” said Richard Compton, who lives nearby.

Bueschel owns his own business, NBS Excavating, in Black Forest. His wife said he had a fracture in one leg and will be kept in the hospital overnight. She said doctors told them he probably would not have survived if more of his body had been crushed, and she’s just thankful he’s okay.