I’m having enough trouble with my fear of drop-offs just reading this thread. I’ll pass on the video, thanks all the same, as I prefer to swim with sharks. (I’m not sure if my hammerhead photo made it to Photobucket.)
I’m not normally afraid of heights–I used to taunt my sister because she wouldn’t go on the meshing stairs at Ontario Place when I was at the top looking down–but I think I’ll make an exceptopn in this case.
He was standing on the aircraft warning beacon at the top of the main structure!
whimper
You have to climb to the top of the TV tower to put a laser on it to keep the bad people away
I had that reaction too. I keep starting to watch it then turn it off. I often have weird nightmares about being on the very edge of a precipice and that same sense of anxiety and vertigo I feel in those dreams is what I feel every time I watch that.
I wonder how much those guys make?
And if anyone is looking for the video, the youtube links are dead but you can find it with a few google keywords. It looks like whomever has copyrighted this is on the rampage to get it taken down.
I can’t help but wonder if its because it sheds light on these workmen (are there any women that do this?) and their practice of “free climbing” without being tied off, which is Jesus Christ incredibly dangerous. I can’t believe they do that, although the video explains why they do it.
I get a freefall feeling in the pit of my stomach when they are standing on that little platform…jeez, the wind gusts must be brutal up there!
It was posted upthread that the climber is asking that it get’s taken down since given the choice many companies would rather hire someone that doesn’t free climb and he’s worried he’s going to lose work over it.
Thanks, Amblydoper and FoisGrasIsEvil for pointing out this video, as well as how to find it. Evidently, the original is in HD. Hopefully they’ll repost it.
Judging from industry commentary such as this, their work procedures are not the industry norms. I’m not in the tower erector or maintenance industry, but I wonder to what degree those claims are true. I have worked blue collar jobs before, and while we had safety procedures and handbooks, it was made clear to me that they were subsumed to getting the job done. Many of you may have similar experiences.
Funnily, I think I’ve seen the tower he was climbing. Houston, since it’s so flat, has quite a few very large towers and I’m such a geek that I like driving out to them and seeing them against the sky. You can hear them too, as the wind whistles through their girders and causes the guy wires to thrum. A comment in one of the blogs hosting the video thought the tower was this one here south west of Houston, Texas and I tend to agree.
Oh, and ironically in a safety discussion, it looks like the tower is very near the site of the infamous Senior Road TV Tower collapse, which killed seven people.
Impressive. The problem lies on the safety system in general. This is money issue, so if you play by the rules, you end up costing more because of the time expended to maintain protection than someone who says, “Screw it, I’ve got a storm blowing in, I’ll free-climb the last 200 feet.”
What is required is installation of reliable, rugged safety equipment on the tower, and that’s not going to happen for cost reasons. Unless industry is mandated to come up with more efficient method of providing protection (let’s say 20 people fall to their deaths in a one month period), the worker safety issue will continue to be one throwing the dice.
2 things about the practice of free climbing -
a) if you were to tie off, you would have to hang on with three limbs while you bent down, unhitched, stretched up and re-attached. During that time, you would be detached, hanging on with only three limbs and shifting your centre of gravity - not a safe practice.
b) The full body fall arrest harness only allows you a few minutes to get retrieved before you asphyxiate. If he were up there solo and fell with the harness, he would die in any case. Even with the partner, I don’t fancy his odds of getting back on his feet before he couldn’t breathe anymore.
It took a few minutes after watching to realise that my toes were clamped to the safety of my carpet. Fuck knows where my kidneys went
Why would he asphyxiate?
I’m guessing the apparatus would choke him somehow? But why would it? I’m imagining a worst case scenario where he would fall, be caught by straps and maybe bounced into the tower, resulting in injury, whereby he’d just hang there until (helicopter?) aid arrived. I don’t know anything about this business. What are the safety/rescue provisions, if any?
This video scares the pants off me though, I’ll tell you that. I have faced a lot of adversity and whatnot in my life but being at 1700 plus feet of height as part of my daily job just isn’t an enemy I can face, heights like that scare the shit out of me.
Spiders, not so much.
Quotation from eHow article on Safety Harness Injuries.
Ah, so grab onto whatever you can to support your body weight immediately after a fall if possible…
How dangerous is this? Part of my job is reviewing the OSHA Weekly Reports of Fatalities and Catastrophes, and using any relevant accidents to motivate my coworkers.
If you look for trends in the reports, you’ll see that what’s really killing people is lack of training, and taking stupid shortcuts. I believe that, absent either of these two factors, any known job can be done safely.
Holy SHIT!
There’s a 150 ft tower at work. There were “tower monkeys” working on it the other day, and I thought that was plenty exciting. That was NOTHING compared to this video!
From the video, “We’re now at the base of the antenna. From here, it’s ‘only’ another 60 ft to the top”. Bwa ha ha! I had no idea the top is so tiny.
Actually, thinking about it, since he said they left the elevator and started the climb at 1600 ft, I wonder if a parachute might actually be practical as a safety equipment. IIRC, even with just a standard sport skydiving reserve chute, you’ll probably be ok if you deploy above 1000 ft. I guess there’s a risk of getting tangled with the tower and any guy wires that may be around, but let’s consider the alternative…
This isn’t that difficult to answer - the system I mentioned above is called DynaGlide.
With this setup, you climb hands free. If you fall (which I have done) you drop a few inches and bang into the ladder you were climbing, allowing you to regain your footing again quickly. There is little manual moving of the rail rider - you can climb quickly and with little training.
That website has a couple of photos of technicians out on antennae arms that aren’t “man rated”, which I assume means that while it may hold the weight of a man, it wasn’t designed to do that.
If that’s the case, and antennae arms are ‘officially’ off limits, how are these repairs supposed to be made?
[quote=“mack, post:58, topic:553872”]
Paraphrasing a dialog in Event Horizon…
Repaiman 1: Hey!, that’s not a load bearing structure!
Repairman 2 climbs up the truss: Now it is!
if the arm gave way while you were on it then you don’t want your safety line connected to the arm. you want your safety line connected to a part that stays put.