Chute

Two young Britons, who said they did it "just for kicks," parachuted yesterday from the 86th-floor observation deck of the Empire State Building. As they floated to the street, one was snagged by a traffic light and the other landed without incident, calmly folded his chute, hopped into a cab and rode away. "The idea was that we would land and then get away, but I didn't land in the way I intended to," said Michael McCarthy, 25, of London, who was arrested after police disentangled him from the light post at 31st Street and Fifth Avenue.

All it took was a shot of glue, an out-of-order sign and a large metal safe to net more than $4,500 in cash and checks for some clever - and unidentified - thief over the weekend, Tredyffrin police said. The glue rendered the keyhole of a Chester County bank deposit chute out of commission. "The lock is broken," police said the sign read, "Use the safe below. " At least two merchants were fooled by the sign and deposited their Saturday sales receipts in the 3-by-3-foot safe, located on the ground in front of the Meridian Bank at the Gateway Shopping Center in Tredyffrin Township.

The focus in the hunt for a missing College of New Jersey freshman took a grim turn yesterday - a dormitory trash chute that authorities inspected with a special tethered fiber-optic camera. A day earlier, investigators searched the 10-story building from top to bottom with cadaver-sniffing dogs. Investigators wanted to get a "good look inside the chute" at Wolfe Hall, where John Fiocco Jr., 19, a well-liked graphic-arts major from Sewell, lived on the fourth floor, said Capt.

A 43-year-old sky diver who completed more than 500 jumps and held the highest license granted by the U.S. Parachute Association plunged 14,000 feet to her death yesterday after her chute apparently failed to open, authorities said. The woman, whose identity was withheld by police, lived in Hamilton Township, Mercer County. Police said she dived with a partner around 11:15 a.m. near Cross Keys Airport in Gloucester County. The two were in a group of 22 sky divers flown by Freefall Adventures of Monroe Township.

Construction worker Ray Lyons (right) only looks as if he's bailing out without a chute. Actually, Lyons and his buddy Latif Ezekiel are only a few feet off the ground as they prepare a prefabricated framing section for a ride up the side of the new Continental Bank building under construction at 36th and Market streets.

James Johnson glanced over his right shoulder, saw Buena's Chris Ricci closing fast, and took a few exaggerated strides to the finish line. Lifting his knees high, he looked as if he were still relatively fresh as he held off Chris Ricci. Then . . . His shoulders slumped, and his head tilted back slowly before coming forward a little more rapidly. If not for meet director Jim Camburn jumping in front of him, Johnson, a West Deptford senior, surely would have landed face first in "the chute" - a place of dread and confusion for exhausted cross-country runners.

Police yesterday found the body of a 2-year-old girl in the basement of a West Philadelphia apartment building where she apparently plunged down the trash chute of the Philadelphia Housing Authority high-rise. Teresse Anne McNair was reported missing about 9:30 p.m. Thursday after she disappeared from the hallway of the 13th floor of the Westpark apartments in the 300 block of North Busti Street. Her body was found inside a trash compactor about 1:30 a.m. Police, joined by friends and relatives of the child, had started searching the 19-story building after she was reported missing.

Funeral services were held yesterday for Joseph John Greco 4th, 26, of Ardmore, who died early last Friday while in Chicago to attend a friend's wedding. According to Chicago police, Mr. Greco fell six stories after climbing into a laundry chute at the Holiday Inn Mart Plaza Hotel, where he was staying. A friend tried to hold onto Mr. Greco after he began to slip while inside the chute. Police said the two had been drinking. Mr. Greco was a 1994 graduate of Villanova University, where he was a member of the 1991-92 varsity lacrosse team and earned a bachelor of arts degree in communications.

Eastbound motorists on the Schuylkill Expressway will face a new kind of highway headache when the final phase of repair work gets under way March 1, the state Department of Transportation said today. The expressway will remain open through the work zone, Spring Garden to South Streets. But motorists will be squeezed into a single lane in each direction at the 30th Street underpass, slowing traffic around the Vine Street Expressway and on Vine Street itself, PennDOT said. PennDOT district engineer Stephen B. Lester, speaking at a PennDOT press conference in St. Davids, Delaware County, said all work was due to be completed by Sept.

You almost hope it isn't his. The raggedy, dirty, old parachute recently found in Washington state, that is. It's near where famed, legendary, disappeared, myth-type person "D.B. Cooper" jumped from a Northwest Orient 727 in 1971 after having hijacked it, forced it to land, gathered up $200,000, then back into the skies for a daredevil leap out of the plane - with the dough fastened to him. Never seen again. Into thin air. Pfffft. He's a member of the Without a Trace Club: Amelia Earhart!

Traffic jams are easing on the Walt Whitman Bridge, as the $140 million redecking enters its final phase about six months ahead of schedule. Construction crews removed concrete barriers Friday -- ending the so-called "cattle chutes" -- and DRPA chief engineer Michael Venuto said Wednesday that "if everything stays on track, we should be wrapping up this fall. " Originally, the work was to be completed in early 2014. The seven-phase redecking project that began in 2010 includes removal of the suspended span, installation of a lightweight grid deck, structural improvements, new parapets, and a new steel-shell movable barrier.

NEWARK, N.J. - When an emaciated pit bull found at the bottom of a trash chute was rushed to a veterinary emergency room last month, doctors there thought he would be dead within the hour. Instead, the scrappy pup, nicknamed Patrick, has defied the odds and is getting stronger by the day. "He is a tremendous fighter," said Dr. Thomas Scavelli, the director and founder of Garden State Veterinary Specialists, the pet hospital in Tinton Falls where Patrick is being treated. "There are very few animals, or any life form, that could have gone through and survived what he has, and really never looked back.

Robert M. Seibert, later a Delaware County lawyer, parachuted during the World War II invasion of Sicily with more materials than he had when he left the plane. "His parachute had no sooner opened than a heavy object landed on top of it," the Evening Bulletin reported in 1943. "The object turned out to be a box of land mines dropped with a 'chute attached by a preceding plane. " On Wednesday, July 21, Mr. Seibert, 89, died of renal failure at the Quadrangle in Haverford, where he had gone for physical therapy.

Isaac Lane was asleep when he was awakened by the screams of a man calling for help early yesterday morning. After about a half-hour, Lane peeped out the door of his sixth-floor high-rise apartment and noticed the bare feet of a man sticking out of a trash chute. "When I looked out, I saw the feet, and his clothes right there by the elevator," he said. It turned out to be his neighbor, John J. Wilson, 57, who, authorities say, got stuck between the fifth and sixth floors of the Philadelphia Housing Authority's Blumberg Senior Citizens' apartment complex, in Brewerytown, about 3 a.m., police said.

Continuing our efforts to get this region and our homes ready for winter, this week's tips will focus on rearranging the tons of snow that some weather forecasters predict this year. I say rearranging, because it will all melt, even if the process takes a couple of weeks, and the goal of any homeowner should be to get as much snow as possible out of harm's way. In 1996, we had a 36-inch snowfall on Jan. 7 and 8. I bought a snow thrower in December 1996 in preparation for another horrific snowstorm.

An express E-ZPass lane on the Betsy Ross Bridge is expected to be operational by 2011, following approval yesterday by the Delaware River Port Authority. The lane, which will let drivers pay tolls without slowing down, is expected to be built on the left side of the toll plaza, with an electronic E-ZPass reader on an overhead gantry. A similar express lane may be built on the Commodore Barry Bridge, DRPA officials said. Because of traffic patterns and bridge design, neither of the agency's two busiest bridges, the Benjamin Franklin and the Walt Whitman, will be outfitted with an express E-ZPass lane.

If scoring droughts were gold, Drexel's basketball team could help rescue the city's financial crisis. Despite giving up the first 12 points of the first half and the first 10 points of the second half in last night's Colonial Athletic Association game against visiting Northeastern, Drexel still held a one-point lead in the closing minutes. But the Dragons couldn't maintain their grip on the lead until the final buzzer. After Drexel's Leon Spencer blocked a shot, the ball bounded to Northeastern guard Baptiste Bataille.

You almost hope it isn't his. The raggedy, dirty, old parachute recently found in Washington state, that is. It's near where famed, legendary, disappeared, myth-type person "D.B. Cooper" jumped from a Northwest Orient 727 in 1971 after having hijacked it, forced it to land, gathered up $200,000, then back into the skies for a daredevil leap out of the plane - with the dough fastened to him. Never seen again. Into thin air. Pfffft. He's a member of the Without a Trace Club: Amelia Earhart!

A beginning skydiver and an experienced instructor connected by a harness crashed to their deaths yesterday in Gloucester County after their parachute malfunctioned, police said. After the main chute failed to open, the reserve deployed but not soon enough to catch air and open, witnesses and police said. The divers hit power lines, snapping wooden supports from the tops of two utility poles, before landing just before noon in the front yard of a home across from the Home Depot in Washington Township.

Customer Arlene Shapley-Oechslin, who had come to arm herself with a new umbrella before the weekend storms, had a question for the brolly-maker, Marc Kaufer. "How can an umbrella place stay in business?" "It's a mystery to me sometimes," admitted Kaufer, whose fourth-generation family firm, Frankford Umbrellas, has been the only manufacturer of its kind in the region for more than two decades. But on second thought, Kaufer said last week, there certainly seem to be a lot of uses for umbrellas, and plenty of people who want a good one. "I get the calls," he said.