Of all the places to get stuck, it had to be 45 stories up. These two window washers had to hold their nerve after their platform broke. What should have been a level ledge to work on, now buckled into a V shape, leaving them dangling precariously above midtown Manhattan in New York.

The nerves may have been felt on the ground but firefighters who ended up rescuing the pair said the workers were remarkably relaxed when they reached them. Their escape route--a hole cut out of one of the windows in the side of the Hearst Tower.

The platform is designed to bend in the middle and has dozens of safety sensors and switches to monitor for problems. An investigation is now under way to figure out why it failed to work properly this time.