Day 6: Friends don’t let friends go splat.

It’s very quiet where I live. At night I hear only a handful of sounds. The refrigerator kicking on, the heater kicking on, the windblown branches scraping the house, passing trains on a track about a mile south, and coyotes.

As I exit my front door in the morning, I can look to the right and see this picture I took, the sun coming up over the prairies, cows grazing under the light of the new day.

When I arrived at class our new instructors were already introducing themselves. The big guy with handlebar mustache was named Ruben and the one wearing the shirt that read “Friends don’t let friends go splat,” was named Cervantes. Good name for a guy in the wind industry, no? They told us a bit about their background and the company they work for. They teach for Airstreams, but the safety course was put together by a company called Tech Safety Lines. They are manufacturers of fall prevention and rescue equipment, which largely involves ropes and carabineers.

We learned quite a bit the first day out. We learned the basics of fall prevention. This often involves the mentioned ropes and carabineers. There are three basic measures of protection. Fall restraint, work positioning, and fall arrest. Fall restraint means that you can’t fall, for example a rope tied to a harness that keeps you from even nearing a building edge where you might fall. Work positioning is a way of clipping a line to your harness so that you can work in an area with both hands but not fall more than two feet. Fall arrest is a system which stops the momentum of a falling body. These measure are often combined. So you have a system of redundant measures to prevent a fall.

All of this is extremely important for wind turbine techs considering they typically work 300 feet above the earth. After discussing fall prevention we moved to proper anchoring, where to attach your harness, and then on to occupational hazards. There are three major ones for working on wind turbines, falling, electricity, and moving parts. I had already read about and been told of these hazards. The pony tail story from the first day is still fresh in my mind. The wind farm manager also told the story of a friend of his who used to climb to the top of a tower and position off, meaning he tied a lanyard around a solid anchor and then clipped the lanyard to himself, then this friend would drink from a thermos of coffee he brought up with him. He did this up until the day he forgot to properly position off and fell to his death.

The instructors had some grizzly pictures to show us of a poor guy who got caught in a rotating piece of machinery. You could tell only that it was a body, but you couldn’t tell where his head was, it just looked like a twisted doll. There was also a picture of a guy who got too close to a high voltage wire. That looked like a charred skeleton. One of the favorites we saw was a video of a man trying to rescue a dummy hanging from a telephone pole. His friends on the ground were heckling him telling him to hurry, and like a fool, he listened. Whipping out his knife he cut down the dummy which fell quickly and most likely damagingly to his dummy destruction. The man then made the mistake of trying to grab the fallen victim and painfully followed himself.

We moved on to rescue techniques, which I’ll get into more over the next few days. But basically there are a few things to remember when rescuing people who have fallen and are suspended by their harness. First you need to do it quickly, the way that a harness compresses a person’s body when he is hanging in it can cut off circulation and cause permanent bodily harm. You have a window of 15 to 20 minutes to get to the guy and get the pressure off of him before suspension trauma takes effect. To do this you have to get into a position where you can get the person in question off the fall arrest device that caught the victim and then transfer them to a lowering device. It’s a pretty complicated series of actions, made more complicated by the fact that someone’s life depends on you doing it correctly. But that’s why they are training us.

After going over an entire manual’s worth of material, the instructors took showed us the equipment we would be using. I have to admit I didn’t really understand what all the stuff was for. I sort of understood how it worked, but it wasn’t until we started working on it the next day that it all started to gel.