The rope rescue team from Bonneville, WA gets it’s practice by helping out during the shutdown of the Bonneville Dam. The members are sent down the side to take care of trees growing out of the walls as well as being on standby while biologists are on rope to do their own bit of inspection.
It seems like a good way for the team get some really great on rope training experience in the place where they are most likely to get a call.
Here are a few different rope articles to whet your kernmantle whistle for the weekend.
First up is an article from the Art of Manliness website sent to us by all around manly man and HazMat guru Jack Spencer. It showcases an exercise done in Navy BUD/S training where candidates tie knots underwater. It’s not a huge mental leap to figure out where this might be a useful process to go through: retrieving objects from under water, stabilization of vehicles in moving water, etc… If nothing else it will help break up the boredom of doing the same drill over and over again. There’s a ton of other cool things on this website that are not rope related, yet somehow are still manly.
Next up is a the way window washers SHOULD be rescued when hanging 35 floors up. The difference in the key words used to describe this incident is a pretty stark contrast to the way the FDNY described it’s window washer rescue: Professional, training, safe vs. dangerous, heroic, 45 minutes with a diamond tipped angle grinder, etc… What I’m getting at is that these types of operations are difficult to PLAN for, they are relatively easy to PREPARE for. The distinction being that you can’t know exactly where an incident like this will occur, but you can know that an incident like this will occur somewhere. Victim pick off should be a pretty straightforward option for a team that says they are capable of performing a rope rescue.
My kind of guy. Rescuer calls it “fun”
And last up is a rescue of a cliff jumper in Alabama. Not your Red Bull type extreme jumping, just a local swimming hole. It looks like a combined ground and helo based plan. As we’ve stated before, the hallmark of a good team is to have a Plan B,C, and D in place. All of those moving pieces still didn’t prevent locals from going right back to jumping though.
Vide0s and stills of cliff rescue
If you remember the “Real Deal” rescue that occurred at Wallace Falls in Northeast Washington that we covered here a couple of weeks ago, then you will surely be interested in the follow up on it with an in depth look at thee operation. The article is written by Tom Vines and was brought to our attention by Mike Forbes from Spokane Fire.
And the elevator shaft wins! A Lexus SUV was driven in to an elevator shaft designed for vehicles in a parking garage. The problem was, there was no elevator car there. According to the articles, the parking garage has 4 citations against it for elevator problems in the past two years. The driver of the vehicle also has 11 drivers license suspensions against him. It’s like the perfect storm of where you don’t want your vehicle to be parked.
Anyhow, they had to go down the shaft and extricate one of the workers, then stand by while the vehicle was recovered.
Here are two links to the story, the first has a video, the second has pictures.
So… not being there it is hard to know, but from looking at the pictures and the videos from around the web it seems that maybe these window washers stuck waaaay up on the 42nd floor (but only a floor below an outside terrace) could have been rescued a bit quicker and with a much higher degree of safety than what you see here. I’m sure the guy on the scaffolding who has had this happen to him two times before this, has seen all the ways to do this rescue. Time for a new job for that guy.
I am aware of the friction between the FDNY the NYPD ESU team, but 4o minutes using a “diamond blade angle grinder” to cut the window and haul these guys in through a window doesn’t seem like the best way to do business. Why add the potential for falling glass to this operation if you don’t need to? I think there is a time and a place for cutting a window, but this just doesn’t seem like it.
If you have any comments, feel free to leave them below.
Here is a short video of the operation:
http://landing.newsinc.com/shared/video.html?freewheel=90051&sitesection=nydailynews&VID=23657684
A couple of pics:
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/local/new_york&id=8732245
Apparently, you can get all of the thrills of rope access, rope rescue, just being at height, etc… without any of the training. I’ve got no affiliation with this, but thought that it was interesting just the same. Should you want that stomach turning feeling of looking over the edge of a high drop, you can do it for about $200.
Of course, I’d rather use that money to buy a new bosuns chair and get paid to do work at that height as I’m sure most people reading this would. Of course, that’s what makes the rope community a bit unique.
http://www.cntower.ca/en-CA/Plan-Your-Visit/Attractions/EdgeWalk.html
Looks like synchronized swimming or something:
The Technical Rescue Team from Gresham, OR rescued a family Pitbull from the wall of a quarry after the dog had gone missing for a couple of days. The dog was spotted by quarry personnel.
Listening to the video, it seems the team used a ladder as a high directional to get out over the edge and keep from knocking down debris that might cause the dog to lose it’s footing.
One neat point was that the local Humane Society told the rescuer being lowered to bring along a T Shirt from the dog’s family. At first I was thinking it was for some sort of crazy improvised harness. Turns out it was so the dog could sniff it and know that the rescuer was one of the pack. I wouldn’t have thought to do that. I guess that’s why it pays to have subject matte experts around.
Thanks to Collin Moon of Elevated Safety for tuning us in to this story.
http://www.cbs12.com/news/top-stories/stories/vid_1105.shtml
Maybe the dog needs to be trained like this one:
Climbing ranger Nick Hall from Mt Ranier died last week after falling more than 3000 feet down the side of Mt Ranier while rescuing 4 climbers who were in need of assistance. All of those in need of rescue survived.
The video below is a quick news piece about the incident. Of interest to me are the comments below the article on whether or not people should pay for their own rescues. There is one unknown poster who lays out some pretty good arguments that people should not pay for there own rescues; R2T happens to agree with that stance.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/22/us/washington-mount-ranier-death/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
Nick Hall on far left of picture;
It seems that some builders have no foresight. For at least the second time in as many months, somebody has crashed through their porch flooring and into a well. This time it was under an overhang, so no aerial was able to be used…. and it was a 60 foot drop. This rope rescue occurred in Hendersonville, NC.
Click here for the article and more pictures:
http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20120622/ARTICLES/120629943?tc=ar
I imagine that these guys had the same problem as the guys doing a well rescue that we talked about a couple of weeks ago: the tripod is going to want to tip towards the direction of haul because of the resultant force being outside of the tripod footprint. Just looking at the pictures, it might have been possible to use the bottom of the porch column for a change of direction down low to help minimize that.
Also take note of the VERY long bights an the end line figure 8 knots. Those are going to eat up a lot of valuable real estate when trying to get in and out of the hole. The knot passing pulley is also going to eat up quite a bit of that same space. By tightening the bights and using a smaller pulley, it is possible to gain several inches of extra clearance where it is needed most.
Rig Tight!
While thoughts of highlines are what occupies the brain of rope geeks as they go to bed, Pat Rhodes does a very nice job point out some of the finer, lesser observed points of highline construction. The video below is a from the Rescue Response Gear TV Series they have on their website. In addition to the highlines, there are also lots of great videos on less complex subjucts, with the same great breakdown of the concepts into digestible bits.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiLyqhftlck?rel=0&w=560&h=315]