Now that’s a tight spot.
A full-figured Brooklyn woman was rescued by authorities yesterday after getting stuck between floors in a trash chute for at least a half-hour.
Firefighters said they had to break down a wall to save Jewel Matthew, 36, who was stuck inside a residency building for SUNY Downstate Medical Center at 440 Lenox Road in East Flatbush.
Matthew, the daughter of a medical-center staffer, somehow went down the chute feet first.
Investigators suspect that it might not have been an accident. She was pulled out and taken to Kings County Hospital in serious condition.
FDNY Battalion Chief Butch Brandes suggested that Matthew’s weight — more than 200 pounds — might have saved her life after she fell from a sixth-floor chute opening.
“If she wasn’t as big as she was, she would have ended up falling to the basement,” Brandes said.
Instead, Matthew got wedged in the 2-foot-wide shaft between the fifth and sixth floors.
Firefighters got Brandes to harness herself with a lifesaving rope they dropped down.
They then removed an 18-by-18-inch chute door and knocked a hole in the wall of the shaft to rescue Brandes. She was cut and badly bruised.
The entire rescue took 25 minutes.
Additional reporting by Liz Sadler.