Cave

Volunteer firefighter John Brownawell wedged through a slit in the sheer cliff wall, into the cave where a man lay trapped. Crawling on his belly, scraping aside dirt and rocks with his hands, Brownawell tried not to think about the 35-foot-high mountain of shale and limestone pressing against his back. The walls of the cave were clammy. About eight feet in, Brownawell reached Sharn Cleland, a caving enthusiast pinned beneath a boulder. "He held my hand the whole time I was in there," said Brownawell, of the Cumberland Goodwill Fire and Rescue Company in Carlisle, Pa. "He squeezed my hand - he was really strong.

After a third street cave-in, the Conshohocken Borough Council and sewer authority have discussed taking legal action against Bud Morello Inc., a Lansdale contractor who installed a sewer line in the 200 block of East 12th Avenue a year ago. The street recently caved in above the new sewer line for the third time since the work was completed by Morello under a contract with the sewer authority. The company repaired the two other holes, and Morello said he expected to begin fixing the new hole today.

Rescuers last night freed a 62-year-old Chester construction worker who was trapped for seven hours from the neck down when the dirt walls of a 15-foot hole he was working in collapsed at 2 p.m. yesterday. More than 200 firefighters and other rescuers from as far as Baltimore County, Md., worked in heavy rain and biting cold to free Edward West, an employee of Cassidy Construction Co. in Yeadon. He was taken to Riddle Memorial Hospital, where he later was listed in guarded condition.

Mark Francis stood trapped 15 feet under the ground for 90 minutes in a pit whose walls were slowly collapsing. As rescue crews fought to free him yesterday, the construction worker was buried deeper and deeper - first covered to his knees, then his waist and, eventually, up to his neck. When firefighters and a Philadelphia Gas Works crew finally managed to free his foot from under an 18-inch sewer pipe at 3:30 p.m., Francis was hoisted out of where he was working, at Walker and Frost streets.

With his Lugz work boots and T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, Mitch Williams looked like a construction guy. Turns out he is. "My father taught me, you never pay someone to do something you can do yourself," the legendary Phillies closer said. Hard to believe, but one of the living symbols of Philadelphia sports history was only a small part of the package when cable's DIY channel came to town to shoot an episode of House Crashers that will be seen in the fall. As crazy construction and reality television swirled all around last week, Wild Thing was anything but. He lent a hand wherever needed, working to transform part of the home of Johnny McDonald, whom the show had decided was one of the world's biggest Phillies fans, into the ultimate baseball spectator environment.

A 24-year-old man exploring a cave in northwestern Lancaster County was killed yesterday afternoon when tons of dirt and rock fell on him after he had already been trapped for more than a day. Rescuers had been working frantically to free Sharn Cleland of Shermans Dale, Perry County, about 50 miles west of this central Pennsylvania town. "We were able to hold his hand, to touch his toes," said Capt. Robert Murray Sr. of the Baltimore County (Md.) Fire Department, his voice breaking.

Haj Issa al-Omoor, 55, is a cave man with a cell phone, a Palestinian shepherd whose West Bank grotto, overlooked by Israeli settlements, is at the heart of an intense dispute over ancient and precious land. The altercation pits Jewish settlers and the state of Israel against the cave dwellers, Arab peasants living in a dozen hamlets of caves and windblown tents on the russet hills south of Hebron. These tribal villages, some of which go back at least to the 19th century and the Ottoman Empire, have long been an irritant in Jewish-Arab relations.

How high can they sky? How deep can they think? Ordinary limits don't apply to St. Joseph's Prep's Juan Cave and Moorestown's Jessica Kloss. Both seniors are aiming for Penn Relays honors this week at Franklin Field. Although they have already decided to attend other colleges, they would feel equally comfortable walking Penn's Ivy League campus or working in its laboratories. Cave, the No. 1 seed in the boys' high-jump championship, will continue his career at Georgia Tech.

Major League Baseball last year came up with a concept: Let's build a "fan cave" in New York, an underground studio with a bank of big-screen televisions, and find a fan to watch every inning of every game in a season. That's 2,430 regular-season games, plus playoffs. Ten thousand fans applied. Two were chosen. There was a day game virtually every day, from April to October, and night games started at 7 in the East and didn't end in the West until 1 or 2 a.m. And in the mornings, when no games were actually being played, ballplayers and celebrities dropped by. The men in the fan cave blogged, tweeted, and drove social-media traffic.

High Bridge, a postcard-perfect town where turn-of-the-century houses cling like mountain goats to precipitous inclines, would look right at home in rural New England. There are even a handful of white-steepled churches to complete the picture. But don't blink as you admire the view. When you open your eyes, parts of High Bridge could be gone, literally swallowed up into the ground - victim of the old iron mines to which the town owes its existence. "Oh, yes," residents tell newcomers, "our mines supplied the cannonballs for the Revolutionary War. " Eight years ago, Diane Hannagan was one of those newcomers.