A man spent days trapped in a San Diego cliffside crevice before being freed after a 19-hour rescue effort

• Rescuers freed a man from a cliffside crevice in San Diego on Friday.
• The man said he had been trapped there for days before passersby noticed him.
• The rescue operation took 19 hours.

After a grueling 19-hour operation on a San Diego cliffside, rescuers successfully extricated a man who was trapped from the waist down inside a crevice.

The San Diego Fire Department said in a statement that rescuers were first alerted to the trapped man on Thursday at 3:40 p.m., after two passersby heard noises and called 911. The man told rescuers he had been stuck in the hole for "a couple of days."