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Ascender in use as a belay

Not Falling Far, Part 3: The Ascender

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My friend Rose Loper used to be a test pilot, the first woman to hold that job at Boeing. Given the preposterone-heavy demographic of the profession this means that, even more than is usual, she had to be at least twice as good at her job as her male counterparts. If you want to meet someone preternaturally capable and calm, you want to meet Rose.

She is also fun-loving, warm, and adventurous, so naturally she became a sailor. She and her spouse Jannie bought a big Halberg-Rassy cutter, and set out to cruise the world. I met them when they came to Port Townsend for some rigging upgrades, and one of the things they were interested in was gear for going aloft. Rose bought one of our climbing harnesses, and she patiently endured my obsessively detailed lecture on its use: how to adjust it for comfort and security; how to attach halyards to it; how to use the multipurpose tether that is built into it; how to use lanyards on anything that might dent a skull if dropped from on high; and other niceties that we have found make going aloft, if never actually safe, at least not actively dangerous.

We also discussed the merits of the various ways that one can climb  a mast. There are numerous methods, and I am about to describe two of them. Bear with me, there is a payoff on all this.

We always go aloft using two halyards: a primary and a safety. I prefer to haul myself aloft on the primary, and have a deck crew tend the safety, but it is also possible to have the deck crew provide the hauling power, leaving the climber to tend their own safety. Rose preferred this method, and I told her that one way to do this task is with a device called an “ascender.” Basically this is a clamp on the rope that is attached to your chair. It slides up a belayed halyard, but won’t slide down. If the primary halyard fails, the ascender grips immediately, which is why in this application it is called a “fall-arrest device.” You are left dangling up there, and will need to figure out a way to get to deck, but things could be worse.

While ascenders work automatically on the way up, most of them require tending on the way down. This was the case with this ascender, and this is where Rose got into trouble. The clamping mechanism is spring-loaded, and you can easily overcome the spring simply by squeezing a projecting piece on the side of the ascender. Now you can come down, and if the primary fails, all you have to do is to let go. The spring snaps the cam onto the rope, and there you are, safely dangling. Sounds easy, right?

So yes, Rose went up her mast to do some maintenance, with the ascender automatically tending itself on the way up. And yes she held it open while Jannie lowered her back towards deck. And yes Jannie had a brief moment of imbalance, and the halyard popped off the outboard end of the winch that the rope was on, and suddenly Rose was in freefall.

This is where it helps to have been a test pilot. As time slowed to the proverbial crawl, Rose looked over at her hand, and said to herself, “Brion told me I have to let go.” And she did. It all happened in an instant, she only fell a very short distance, so no massive jolt when she fetched up, no harm was done. But it took a conscious, non-panicking, steel-nerved act of will to open her hand.

The reason that it was so hard to let go is that our arboreal ancestors gifted us with a powerful reflex: if you start to fall, you grab the nearest object and hang on for all you are worth. This reflex is one of the reasons we still exist as a species. It is a good reflex. You want to have this reflex. Unless of course the thing that you are hanging onto will kill you if you don’t let go of it. There are numerous sad stories about people who just couldn’t manage to let go. There is a metaphor in there somewhere.

This was the third part of the three-part “Not Falling Far” series. To see part 1, “The Flag,” click Here To see part 2, “The Bounce Test,” click Here.

Enjoy the story? Looking for more? You’re in luck! “Falling,” which in includes all three of these stories along with other tales from aloft, both thrilling and amusing, is now for sale on Amazon.com in handy e-book form! Or click here to get it on Apple iBooks!

From dropped tools to collapsed towers to near-fatal falls, the litany of accidents and near-accidents is long… and the sometimes miraculous outcomes are both instructive and thought-provoking.

Not a technical manual, “Falling” is nonetheless a must-have companion in the library of anyone working at heights.

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Fair leads,

Brion Toss

An Earnest of Intent Picture

An Earnest of Intent

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The track ran across the property on a steep-sided, 20-foot-tall embankment. I could see the rails shining in the bright starlight. They stretched off into the glacial plains near Tenino, Washington. A train horn sounded, far away, then again, closer. Chopper handed me the ends of two very, very long extension cords, and said, “When I say go, you plug them together.”

The tracks bisected a 90-acre ranch that was to be the site of a rock festival, Sky River II. It was 1969. At the other end of the country, a much bigger festival was gearing up in Woodstock, New York. But even our smaller event was expected to draw a couple-hundred-thousand people or so. The plan was to have folks park on one side of the embankment, and then funnel them into the performance area through a narrow notch, topped by a trestle, in the middle of the property. Our hope was that thereby at least some people might actually pay to get in. But we were dealing with hippies here, so we understood that quite a few of them were likely to scramble up the embankment, cross the tracks, and scramble down. The problem was the train, an express that brought boxcars full of apples from Wenatchee, and brought them at about sixty miles per hour. If we couldn’t slow that train way down, it seemed inevitable that some number of stoned/daredevil/oblivious gate-crashers were going to get smushed.

So we called up the railroad company, told them our story, asked for a little consideration. They sent out men in suits and hardhats, in a car mounted on train wheels that rolled to a stop near the trestle. The men got out, looked around, pointed, conferred, got back in the car, and drove away. The train kept coming through at sixty.

We called the railroad again, and again, as the date of the festival neared. I was on the crew that built the stage and the vendor shacks, among other things, and every day I saw the train hurtle by, and every day I worried a bit more. We all did. Once, some local kids were lolling on the trestle, watching us longhairs at our work, and the combination of the noise we were making, and the music they were playing, and the novelty we provided resulted in their not noticing that a train was bearing down on them. Fortunately it was a very short trestle, and they were able to get out of the way. But in a few more days there was going to be high-decibel music playing around the clock, for a lot of people. So we called and pleaded some more, but the train kept barreling through.

Our work days were long, and often stretched well into the night, so we would set up generator-powered lights, and drag them and their cables hither and yon. I worked with a man named Chopper, who was the wise, knowledgeable, skillful reason that we had any hope of successfully assembling the needed infrastructure. He was a carpenter, a plumber, an electrician, a labor mediator, a cook, and more. It was said that he could light a campfire in the rain, using green twigs, a pack of wet ZigZag papers, and a single match. We all worshipped him, and we all learned a lot from him.

With the passage of years, I have come to realize that he was also maybe a bit, um, impulsive. But at the time he just seemed creative. One night, with the opening just a few days away, he asked me to help him with a little project. It was late, and I had been running a Ditch Witch all day, then laboring under the lights building the stage, but I said sure. Together we dragged a couple of work lights, on their stands, over to the trestle. We carried one of them up the embankment on one side, then climbed down and took the other one up on the other side. Then we snaked cables from them to a generator, and rigged a separate pair of cords that ran to a junction that connected all the components. We dragged those cords up the embankment, settled in, and waited.

Crickets, a little sough of wind, the hum of the generator, and then that horn, approaching. The train appeared from around a bend, its big headlights jiddering a bit as it thundered towards us. As it got closer its mass and power became palpable. The ground began to shake. When it was about half a mile away, Chopper shouted, “Go!”

I shoved the plugs together, and instantly two bright lights lit up, about five feet off the ground, directly adjacent to the tracks. From where we sat – and from the cab of the train – it looked rather like the lights of a train coming the other way. It didn’t make any sense, but it didn’t have to. The engineer immediately locked up the brakes, and there commenced the most glorious, terrifying, massive skid imaginable. The engines slid past us, speed barely diminished, followed by the boxcars. Huge showers of sparks flew off the wheels, and the air was filled with the sound of steel squealing on steel, and of boxcars slamming into each other. Car after car went by, the speed of the whole assembly gradually diminishing until it all came to a stop, with the last cars hulking next to us, and the front of the train at least a mile past where the skid had started.

For a minute or two there was just some hissing of valves, and the distant thrum of idling engines. Then the train slowly gathered way, accelerated, and made its way into the night.

The next day, and right through the festival, every train slowed to a crawl as it neared the site. Once I saw it stop to let some hitch hikers off. The crew waved at the crowd.

 

There is an ancient term, “An earnest of intent.” It means a sort of downpayment. It is a promise that you will follow through, and evidence that you can follow through. It lets the other person know that you are serious.

 

 

Note: A few years after the events described here, Alfred D’Attore wrote a story on a whole different topic, but with a related theme. With apologies to him, I’ve used the same title.

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The Parable of the Codes

A couple had their house rewired, and got into a bit of a set-to with the electricians about how the job was done. Contractors often have to deal with clients trying to micromanage things, but this couple actually knew about electrical building codes, and could see that the electricians were skipping some crucial steps. Basically they were treating the code’s redundancies, specifications, and assorted failsafes as if they were optional layers of protection, details that they could choose to bypass in the interests of getting the job done quicker, cheaper, and easier. Things like rough terminations, extra outlets on a circuit, things like that. Of course, the layers they were skipping were ones that would be covered by sheetrock before the electrical inspector came around. When called on this, the response the couple got was along the lines of, “Come on, when was the last time you heard about anyone being electrocuted by their house?”

U.S. building codes for electricity go back to the 1880’s, when the lightbulb was just beginning to hit its stride. Homes that were built with no regard for the presence of wiring were suddenly festooned with wires bearing live current. At first, many of these wires were completely uncovered and/or poorly grounded and/or insufficiently conductive. The consequential injuries and deaths soon prompted the creation of local standards that in some regards seem quaint now. One, from New York in 1881 specified that, “All Arc lights must be protected by glass globes, enclosed at the bottom, to effectually prevent sparks or particles of the carbons from falling from the lamps, and in show windows, mills and other places, where there are materials of an inflammable nature. Chimneys with spark arresters shall be placed at the top of the globe.”

In the same document, though, were provisions for impedance, emergency shutoffs, and insulation, so the authors had the basics covered. The following decades saw a rapid growth and refinement of recommended practices, and a national code was widely accepted by the beginning of the 20th century, covering things like fuses, circuit breakers, wall switches, and receptacle outlets. From the beginning, fire prevention was at least as high a priority as electrocution prevention, and the early codes were sufficiently thorough and rigorous that they are not profoundly different from modern versions. As one writer pointed out, we are likely to feel comfortable sleeping in a house with 90-year-old wiring, but probably not so happy about riding in a 90-year-old car or airplane.

In the 1960’s ground-fault-circuit-interrupters (GFCI) came on the scene, followed in the 1990’s by arc-fault-circuit-interrupters (AFCI), which made for wonderful, life-saving additions to the codes. Today there are still many deaths and injuries attributable to residential wiring, but the bulk are due to operator error, not to shortcomings of the codes.

Unfortunately, as the couple discovered, not everyone wants to follow the codes, and I think this is in part due to their long history. Codes are formally certified traditions. They are evidence of experience that leads to adaptive, productive, safe behavior. They cover many, many years of human experience, so they are messages from our forebears, a way of saying, “We screwed up. Don’t you screw up. Follow these rules and you’ll be alright.” Or as a friend of mine put it, “Tradition is so you don’t have to make 200 years of mistakes.” The trouble is that codes and other forms of tradition, in order to be concise, can’t always give the full reasons behind a given practice, so those reasons tend to slip into a different usage of the term code, in which information is hidden from those who lack understanding. The inheritors of a code have to revive the reasons for its existence constantly, or risk forgetting why it is there. Those electricians were so insulated, so to speak, from electrical disasters that they thought the rules were just some sort of paranoid bureaucratic imposition on sensible behavior. And there might be such rules, but that is not the way to bet. It is much more likely that every line of every construction code is written in blood.

 

 

This is a version of a tale from the same raconteur who, several many years ago, gave me the Parable of the Parrel. And I still can’t remember his name.

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The Parable of the Parrel

Some square-rig sailors were talking about interesting problems they’d encountered while under sail. Given the hazards of the marine environment, the complexities of the rigs, and the huge forces that move through those rigs, the stories tended towards the scary/hilarious. It’s amazing how much trouble one can get into when confronted with high winds, steep seas, huge sails, and several miles of running and standing rigging.

One deeply experienced skipper was describing what happened when, in an extremely lumpy, storm-driven sea, the fore course yard parrel on his boat let go. The parrel, on pre-19th-century-style ships, is essentially a massive, very formally-constructed lashing. It holds the yard to its mast, yet allows the yard to pivot and tilt. If a parrel breaks, the yard might still be suspended at its middle by the tie or halyard, as well as by the lifts at its ends. It will also restrained from below by the braces, and by the sheets at the lower corners of the sail when it is set. But even with all these attachments intact, failure of the parrel means that the yard, which in this case weighed about a ton, can and will slide a good ways laterally as well as swinging fore and aft, bashing the mast and tearing up assorted gear, both its own and that of adjacent spars and sails. That’s why, in this instance, a brave and experienced hand went very carefully aloft to constrain the yard. Essentially the task was to lasso the damn thing and lash it to the mast.

All eyes were on him as he struggled to  build a jury rig without getting crushed. “And of course,” said the skipper telling the story, “it’s especially bad when something like that happens,” at which statement everyone nodded in agreement, except for a young deckhand who was listening in, who looked puzzled and asked, “Why’s that? Because the crewmember was in danger? Because the sail can carry away? Because the yard can break, or the parrel get caught in the –” “No, no,” chorused several old salts, and then the first skipper explained, “It’s because that’s when the generator catches fire.”

Now the young deckhand was really puzzled, and asked “How could a parted parrel have anything to do with a flaming generator?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute,” replied the skipper. “First, let’s take a look at how the yard got loose.

“It takes layers of protection to avoid  mishaps. In the case of the lower yard parrel, there was first a redundancy in scantlings. That is, the materials were way stronger than the loads required. In addition, the yard was part of a system comprising several other yards, as well as sails without yards, any several of which we could get along without, and that is redundancy in components. And finally, the overlapping actions of the crew –regular inspections, cycling of materials, ongoing awareness – make for a redundancy of efforts.

“The lower yard is the most important piece in its system, since it’s the biggest, and because the other yards on that mast are sheeted to it, directly or indirectly. You can still work around it, but without that parrel it can do a lot of damage, which is why we sent someone up there to secure it. The parrel’s redundancies had failed. The surplus strength had worn away, we in the crew didn’t spot the wear, and then that storm hit, and we suffered the consequences.”

“Okay, so you’re saying that there weren’t enough redundancies in the rig, and that’s why the parrel failed.”

Not exactly. Obviously, if we’d done our job better, the yard wouldn’t have broken free in the first place, but redundancy and skill and care can never completely eliminate the possibility of failure. So I’m not talking about how important it is to keep things in optimal shape. I’m talking about what you do when things inevitably go sideways. I’m talking about a larger system, with deeper opportunities for chaos. Let’s look at the generator now.”

“At last, the generator.”

“This was one of two, both good machines, both properly maintained. Nothing the matter with them, lots of protocols and failsafes. But when they were installed, there was a flaw in how the venting was laid out. Not a major flaw; it just wasn’t optimal in terms of keeping seawater out in extreme conditions, the kind that even seagoing vessels rarely encounter.”

“And venting for extreme conditions means a lot of extra time and labor to prevent things that are probably never going to happen. Got it.”

“Exactly. It was a flaw that could only be exploited by violent vessel motion, with water pouring into places that it isn’t meant to pour, merrily shorting things out, and starting a fire. Meanwhile that yard is thrashing around, some poor sod is aloft, trying to secure it without dying, the wind is still screaming, the boat is lurching to and fro, and everyone’s attention is either on keeping the ship head to wind, or watching the drama. That’s why the only person who sees the smoke coming out of the deck, way aft, is the person aloft. He shouts, but of course no one can hear a word. He waves and points, but everyone assumes that his gestures have something to do with the yard. They’re scratching their heads and shouting at each other in an attempt to confer, and all the while that smoke is getting thicker.”

“This is just an example, isn’t it?”, says the young skipper.

“Yes, good, yes. The second catastrophe could just as easily have been someone falling down a hatch, or a line about to get wrapped in the prop, or any of a hundred other things. The point to remember is that catastrophes don’t pick on one weak spot at a time; they’re after all of them, always. So when one thing fails, even though you might have your hands really full dealing with the consequences, it might be a good idea to look around for whatever else might be failing. It’s a good thing that we finally did just that.”

“Huh,” says the deckhand, “It’s like an emergency version of being at the helm: focus on your course, but keep scanning the horizon.”

“Ahhh,” say the old hands.

 

This story is the first of a series of rigging parables. It is a modified retelling of an actual conversation, from some years ago, and I fear that I have forgotten the name of the captain who told it to me. If you are out there, please be in touch if you’d like attribution, and/or to correct my recollection.


Enjoy the story? Looking for more? You’re in luck! “Falling,” which in includes this and other tales from aloft, both thrilling and amusing, is now for sale on Amazon.com in handy e-book form! Or click here to get it on Apple iBooks!

From dropped tools to collapsed towers to near-fatal falls, the litany of accidents and near-accidents is long… and the sometimes miraculous outcomes are both instructive and thought-provoking.

Not a technical manual, “Falling” is nonetheless a must-have companion in the library of anyone working at heights.