Re: How'd you like to have this job........
Tower climbing is like going into battle, stepping out the door of a perfectly good airplane, or rushing into a burning building with an SCBA tank on your back. You can read and talk about the experiences all you want to, but with some experiences either you've been there or you haven't. Fortunately, I've only been up towers.
I never worked above 180 feet. Where you have hills and mountains, there is less need for the monsters that are often erected in the prairies. I started in the days of just a "Scare Strap" around the waist to free up your hands when you worked, and continued into the early days of fall arrest. I used to free climb, and like the man in the video used the fall arrest only when resting or when passing dishes, etc. But I have had both feet slip off of an icy tower in January at 100 feet up, and it wasn't fun. Fortunately, I had both hands hanging on at the time.
The thing that scared me most about the video was that the two climbers were free climbing a quarter mile in the air, and when the cameraman did toss the fall arrest hook on a peg, it wasn't very securely. Maybe the wind doesn't suddenly gust like it does on hilltops here. When I would stop for a breather, I used to attach the waist strap, too.
A little-known OSHA rule is that you must wear fall arrest when your feet are 6 feet above the next lower surface. You see the videos of solar installers wearing harnesses on one-story homes with shallow slopes to the roofs. That means that walking on the the roof of a skoolie (for pay) is an OSHA violation.
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Someone said "Making good decisions comes from experience, experience comes from bad decisions." I say there are three kinds of people: those who learn from their mistakes, those who learn from the mistakes of others, and those who never learn.
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