A base jumper spent part of Tuesday night clinging to the outside of a central Auckland hotel tower, roughly 23 floors above Albert Street, before firefighters cut away the windows beside him and hauled him inside. He walked away with minor injuries and was handed to police. It is the second base jump off an Auckland city-centre high-rise in less than three weeks.
Emergency services were called at about 10.40pm on Tuesday 20 October to reports of a man trapped on the facade of a building on Albert Street, RNZ reported. Fire and Emergency northern shift manager Josh Pennefather told the NZ Herald and Newstalk ZB the man had jumped from the 27th-floor roof of the Hotel Indigo and was left stuck on the outside of the building.
Auckland City senior station officer Darren Gussey, who was part of the specialist high angle rescue team sent to the scene, told 1News the call came in at approximately 10.45pm as a person trapped on the side of the building.
“As it turns out, it was a base jumper that was trapped on the external wall of the building, approximately 23 levels up,” Gussey said. “We’ve had a multi-agency response with police and St John, and on arrival, a complex rescue had to be undertaken.”
Gussey said the man was “clinging to the exterior of the building, so we’ve had to secure the patient using our specialist high-angle rescue team”. The crew could hear from him that time was running short. Gussey said “the person was reporting that he didn’t have much left in him”. “So we gathered from that that he was basically clinging on to some part of the structure,” he said.
From street level, onlookers could see a first responder working on a protective window pane near the stranded man at around 11pm, with drilling audible below and curtains being pulled back in an apartment above, the Herald reported. About 50 people gathered on the surrounding streets to watch, and they cheered loudly when the parachutist was finally pulled through the window.
Gussey said that once crews had removed the exterior windows they were able to retrieve the man, who did not need to go to hospital. “Basically, the person appears to have no injuries at all, and he is assisting police with their inquiries,” he said. “He has been checked out by the CERT team medic from St John, and then once he was safely in the room, he was handed over to police.”
Hato Hone St John said it sent an operations manager, an ambulance and a rapid response unit to Albert Street after being called at 10.40pm, and that the man received minor injuries. Gussey said it was “always a relief when you can save somebody from a what would be a terrible scene”. Police had not responded to media requests for comment when those reports were published on Wednesday morning, including on whether anyone had been arrested.
Base jumping takes its name from the four kinds of fixed object its practitioners leap from, buildings, antennas, spans and earth, and relies on a parachute opening within a few seconds of leaving the structure. There is no run-up and no second chance if the canopy snags or the wind turns, which is why a jumper who ends up hanging from a tower facade needs a rope rescue rather than a ladder.
The Hotel Indigo is a relatively new addition to the Auckland skyline. Hotel operator IHG said at the hotel’s official opening in April 2025 that it occupies 27 floors of a 41-storey tower on Albert Street, with 225 rooms and 30 residential apartments above, on the site of a 1912 motor house that once imported Cadillacs into New Zealand, according to its launch announcement. The Herald described the man being brought in through an apartment window.
Tuesday night’s rescue follows a jump at the start of the month from the far taller, and still unfinished, Seascape tower a few blocks away. On 2 October a jumper posting under the name iliesnec released video of himself leaping from the 187 metre tower and landing on Beach Road, 1News reported at the time. That stunt was carried out from a building that has sat idle since a dispute between its developer and its builder, and whose receivers last week found a conditional buyer tipped to turn it into a hotel.
Police were blunt about the Seascape jump. “Police are aware of a video circulating on social media showing a person base jumping off a building in Auckland’s CBD,” a spokesperson said in that 2 October statement. “Inquiries are ongoing to identify those involved, and whether they had authorisation to access the building jumped from.” The spokesperson added, “Police want to remind the public acts like these are reckless and pose a risk to not only the person jumping, but people on the ground.”
Nothing in the published accounts links the two jumps to the same person, and police have not said whether the man rescued on Tuesday night will face any charge. The two incidents differ in an important way. The Seascape jumper used an abandoned construction site with no residents and no guests. The Hotel Indigo was a working hotel with people in its rooms and apartments on a Tuesday night, and the rescue meant specialist crews drilling out windows on an occupied floor while traffic and onlookers filled the street below.
Auckland’s downtown towers have drawn a steady run of stunts in recent years, from teenagers filmed dangling off high-rises to a youth who climbed the crane on the Seascape site in early 2025, prompting police warnings to young people about sharing such footage. What was different on Tuesday was that this one ended with a man hanging from the side of a building, telling the firefighters above him that he was running out of strength.
Fire and Emergency’s high angle teams are more often seen on cliff faces and in the bush. The Auckland City crew is the region’s specialist lines rescue unit, and is usually flown by helicopter to jobs more than 45 minutes from the city, a 2024 Watercare rescue exercise noted. On Tuesday night the job was a short drive from its Pitt Street base, straight up the side of one of the city’s newest hotels.
Should base jumping from Auckland’s city towers carry a specific penalty, or is the existing law enough? Were you on Albert Street when the crowd cheered? Tell us what you saw in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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