Conditions up there can be pretty harsh. You’d need a weatherproof container, or any tools you cache up there would soon be useless. If the installation is a very simple one, and all you need is a wrench or two, it might be worthwhile to have a small container in place. You’d probably end up hauling a bunch of crap up with you anyway, though. (Replacement parts, test equipment, etc.) You really don’t want to get all the way up there and find that a tool is unusable or missing, or that you didn’t bring something you needed. (With simpler towers, it’s not as bad–you can lower a line and someone at a staging point can bring the thing you need and tie it on for you to pull up. That doesn’t look practical with the tower in the video, though.)
I tried to search before, but could never find the answer.
What is the fatality rate for this line of work? It is obvious one mistake=death, but maybe they never make mistakes?
I’m guessing they are professional tower repair folks.
Strongly recommended, if you’re into geek stuff.
Do they say that? I thought it was an occasional thing.
Do they give any thought to this when they design the towers? In the OP video, there’s a section where the tower is just a solid cylinder with rungs sticking out; I’m not sure where you’d attach a line that would stop you from falling, but couldn’t just slip off one of the rungs. And there are times when the climber has to lean out to get past overhangs. If there’s equipment at the top that needs maintenance, couldn’t they have made it a little easier for a person to get there?
This isn’t really the same type of thing, but this guy was quite a daredevil.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuu…
Was he bitten by a radioactive spider as a child?
The rungs have end stops on them, which isn’t perfect but I think it would stop you if you had a carabiner over one of them.
Makes sure kambucta is okay…then frisks for climbing ticket so I can do it twice!
You’d trust your life to that one inch of upturned metal at the end of the rungs? I think you’d be better off with a line wrapped around the cylinder and count on the rungs to keep it from sliding down if you fall. Still not guaranteed.
I had similar thoughts while watching episodes of Dirty Jobs. I remember Mike squeezing through some narrow opening to get where he could grease the wheels on an aerial tram. Did the people who designed the thing not know someone would need to get in there at some point?
Not ideally but it’s not quite as bad as your comment under reply suggested, is all.
This is why technicians hate engineers. (Having been both, I know.)
I thought you’d say something like “if we put attachments for safety lines on the tower it would interfere with the signals being broadcast.” Is there really no good reason? I’d hate the engineers too if they hadn’t put some thought into getting me up there safely.
I just showed the OP link to my wife. She was sitting on a stool in the kitchen, 10 feet from the computer and was white-knuckle gripping the counter; the wide-eyed look on her face said it all. She said she’ll probably be having nightmares tonight.
Ain’t I a stinker?
Yes, she’ll fix my wagon for this.
It’s amazing to me how strong that instinct is, even when you know it’s not rational.
There’s a cathedral of some sort in Guadalarja that is built with a giant mirror on the floor, so that when you look down into it, you feel as if you are staring down from a great height at the ceiling reflected in the mirror.
I could barely get within two feet of the mirror. I know perfectly well there’s no danger… it’s a freaking mirror on the floor… but I could not.
Wow, I never felt like this before. I was scared shitless. :eek:
<snip> Anything like that actually paralyses me. Literally. Walking up the steps in a lighthouse (with gaps on the risers) many years ago I froze half way up…not able to go up OR down. That was fun. <snip>
My mom had that reaction once. Partway down the Statue of Liberty.
I actually find it scary just looking at high antenna towers like that just imagining that someone must at some point have been up there. It’s the visceral and not the intellectual aspect that’s so disturbing. I didn’t particularly have a huge problem jumping out of airplanes in my brief fling with parachuting because there’s really no sense of perspective looking at the ground from 3000 ft and you have this technology that you’ve been taught to understand and trust. But I physically could not climb a tower like that. It’s a really ingrained primal fear. I actually dislike being in those fancy glass-wall boardrooms that always seem to be located something like 50 stories high or more.
ETA: One further thing that the video doesn’t even convey is that it’s probably very windy up there, too, just to add to the fun! :eek:
Come to the CN Tower in Toronto! You can stand on an actual glass floor 1,122 ft above the ground – and it’s not an illusion!
Oh that picture freaks me out. Just reading “could just fall over backward” makes me getting that woozy feeling.