GUILDERLAND — The force’s Lifesaving Award is “not given very often,” said Police Chief Carol Lawlor, but Officer Bob Bailey recently received it — for the second time.

Bailey earned the award for his actions “without regard for personal safety” this fall, Lawlor said, when he stepped out onto a bridge over I-90 to bring in a girl who was threatening to jump.

“There was no ledge,” recalled Bailey, who said that police had received “numerous calls” in the September incident, about a girl who had climbed over the fence on the bridge on Carman Road that stretches over I-90’s westbound lanes.

“It’s a straight drop there,” Bailey said.

When he arrived, several civilians, he said — "I still don’t know who they were” — were already talking to the girl, and she had come a little closer back toward solid ground. He estimated, though, that she was still two lanes of traffic over.

Bailey climbed the fence and let himself down over the other side while turning his body around to face the fence, just as the girl had, and “kind of jammed my boots into the chain-link fence.” He slowly made his way toward her.

What was he saying to her? “More or less, just ‘Relax, it’s going to be all right,’ and ‘Just focus on me.’”

She was coming towards him, too. They met about midway back, over the first lane of traffic.

Once she was close enough, he held onto the fence with one hand, and wrapped the other arm around her, in a “bear hug.”

He had a “death grip on that fence,” he said.

She seemed exhausted; “you could see her shaking,” he said.

He told her to relax for a minute, that he was not going to let go, and that she was not going to fall.

Once she had caught her breath, he said, the two of them “inched back along” together.

When they were safely on land, emergency medical personnel took her to the hospital, Bailey said.

Was he really confident, all along, that they were not going to fall?

Bailey was silent for a while. “If we had fallen, the chances of surviving the fall would be OK, because I think it’s only about 20 feet up. But we were over the interstate. There’s a good chance we would have seen a Mac truck up close.”

But yes, he said, “I had confidence. Absolutely.”

Bailey noted that, while he is not exactly “afraid” of heights, he is “not what I would call ‘comfortable’ with them, either.”

This is the second time Bailey was honored for saving a life.

Twelve or 13 years ago, he said, the engine compartment of a car had caught on fire, with the driver and a passenger inside, he said. He put out the fire, first, then moved on to trying to pry open the doors. He was joined by medics, and together they managed to free both people.

Both times, he said, he was just doing his job. “I was born and raised here. My parents were born and raised here,” said Bailey of Guilderland. “It’s what you do for your community.”

He does wear his two Lifesaving Awards on his uniform all the time, he said. “It’s a pride thing, so I know I did a good job.”

Bailey, who is 45, is married with two children. He was asked if his wife, Judy Bailey, was worried when she heard about his actions.

She was not, he said. She’s a first responder herself — an emergency medical technician with the Altamont Rescue Squad. She knows as well as anyone, he said, that, in an emergency, “You do what needs to be done.”