This guy knows he’s gonna die, and it will take about 20 minutes…

You spend any time at all in a big room that has a cop scanner and you get to where you can tell right away if it’s important. There’s a tone of voice, adrenalin mebbe.

A guy is working on a crew digging a ditch alongside a road, putting in a big sewer line. There’s been a cave-in. He’s half buried.

They’re sending everybody.

This guy has been working inside one of those massive metal safety barriers, the thing with the big walls on either side of the guys working in the hole.

But Florida’s got some stuff that’s like quicksand, or worse. It sucks you down and keeps you.

As soon as this guy was in the clutches, his team jumped in there with shovels and buckets. No good. They tried a backhoe. No good. They tried pumping the stuff out. No good. They tried tying a rope under his shoulders and lifting him out. It was tearing him in half.

He was huge. And the suction was too great.

We’re talking dozens of guys, broad daylight, every kind of equipment you can imagine. They can’t get him out. Construction guys throwing their hard hats on the ground and bursting into tears.

Finally a guy got down there next to him with a pad and a pen. He wrote, as the guy dictated his will, his final messages to his family.

They kept trying until the end.