Part-time sanitation worker Eric Pagan, 20, was shoveling snow outside a Department of Sanitation depot in Inwood yesterday when he fell through a ventilation grate for the 1 train. Pagan had spent the day shoveling sidewalks and crosswalks for the city, but when he returned to the depot, the supervisor wouldn't let him knock off because it wasn't quite 5 p.m. yet. Instead, Pagan and another worker were tasked with shoveling the sidewalk outside the depot. Minutes later, he was bleeding at the bottom of a hole.
"Eric was standing there for a minute, shoveling," co-worker Peter Lopez tells the Post. "He stepped on the edge of the grate and it just flipped over on him. He goes straight down and the grate hit him on the way. I was in shock. I looked down there and I could see he was leaking blood all over." Pagan's head was gashed in the fall, after which Lopez called down to him with the same dumb rhetorical question we all feel compelled to ask when we see someone fall or hit their heads: "Are you ok?!"
Not really. Pagan was stuck down there for 15 minutes before EMTs arrived, and reported feelings of nausea, claustrophobia, and coldness—basically, what you would expect after hitting your head and falling into a hole in the middle of winter. But his uncle Joseph Rodriguez, who was on Pagan's shoveling crew, tells the Daily News, "It was his hood and his hat that saved him from cracking his melon." Pagan is currently listed in stable condition at Harlem Hospital. It's unclear if he'll be paid for the time spent not shoveling at the end of his shift.
