2 occupants rescued after hot air balloon hits, gets stuck on Gregg County cell tower<\/p>\n
Published 11:29 am Saturday, February 28, 2026<\/p>\n
First responders from the Longview Fire Department and other area agencies rescued two occupants in a hot air balloon basket Saturday after the balloon hit a cell tower near the intersection of Texas 300 and FM 1844 in northern Gregg County.<\/p>\n
The two occupants, who authorities did not identify, were stuck in the basket at an estimated height of 920 feet, according to the Longview Fire Department.<\/p>\n
Longview Fire Marshal Marcus Delaney confirmed the two people were rescued, CBS19 reported.<\/p>\n
\u201cClimbing operations began around 8:50 a.m. using multiple rope systems due to the extreme height and complexity of the incident,\u201d the fire department said. \u201cRescuers made patient contact at approximately 10 a.m. Both occupants are conscious and, at this time, no injuries have been reported.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll members of the rescue team are part of our highly trained Special Operations Unit from Stations 5 and 2, operating in a coordinated technical rescue effort. Longview is in command of the scene and the operational activities.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"2 occupants rescued after hot air balloon hits, gets stuck on Gregg County cell tower Published 11:29 am…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":496088,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4,450,451,3,452,453],"class_list":["post-496087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-breaking-news","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=496087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/496088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=496087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=496087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=496087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}