A.J. Gow has spoken out about the six hours he spent trapped inside a 130-foot gas station sign, revealing he recorded what he believed would be his final words to his wife and children.
Gow, an electrician who services signs, became stranded on July 23 at a station in Wilmington, Illinois, roughly an hour southwest of Chicago, after his lift malfunctioned while he was working. The 130-foot structure swayed and trapped him without air circulation on a sweltering day, leaving him to face the possibility he would not survive.
“In the moment, it was getting hairy. I mean I was getting — I was genuinely getting scared, and I didn’t know what was going to happen. And yeah, I was freaking out,” he recalled in an interview with ABC 7 Chicago.
The job had begun routinely. Gow sent his co-worker down to retrieve water and a battery-powered fan as temperatures climbed inside the narrow sign. “He went down, and on his way back up the lift had an issue and could not make it back,” Gow explained to the outlet.
For the first hours, Gow was not alarmed. But after approximately four hours without water, his physical condition deteriorated sharply. “Eventually I started to feel like crap. And I told [my co-worker], you know, call EMS. I said, I don’t care what you have to do, get me down,” he said.
Fire crews responded to the scene on Lorenzo Road, yet their ladders extended only 100 feet — thirty feet short of reaching him. Multiple attempts to repair the lift from the ground failed. Authorities eventually secured a replacement lift from a job site approximately 17 miles away and transported it by police escort.
As the replacement equipment arrived, Gow’s spirits lifted visibly. He flashed a thumbs-up to a local news helicopter circling overhead, a gesture captured on video that quickly spread across social media platforms.
The messages he recorded for his family during his ordeal were born of genuine fear. “God forbid if something were to actually happen – it was my final words. So essentially a goodbye without saying goodbye,” he said of the recordings he made for his wife and kids.
Gow later shared on social media that he escaped physical injury but required hospitalization for severe dehydration. He has since returned to his job repairing electric signs. The experience, he told ABC 7 Chicago, is now something he can look back on and “laugh at” — though it has permanently changed his approach to safety. He added that he will make sure he always stays inside his lift bucket going forward.
The viral attention surprised him. “I was not prepared for it to get as much traction as it did,” Gow said. “I had no idea that I was going to be stuck up here for that long, or was going to be anywhere near that kind of scenario.”