Day 7: What Climbs Up Must Come Down

Morning began with bullshitting about knocking out the rescue victim if he fights you. This was combined with references to a video we watched yesterday in which a guy was yelled at to cut someone down, this resulted in the rescue dummy and the rescuer falling to the ground. There is quite a bit of bullshitting that goes on in these classes. And as we practiced our climbing and rescue the coming week there would be a lot of time to do so.

Then we reviewed some test questions and took a test. A few of the terms I didn’t know at all, and if I don’t know it, I thought it’s more dangerous to luck through an exam and get out on the field without a clue than to retest. This is in fact an accepted philosophy, which I would later find out is summed up as “You guess, you die.” But even with the blank questions I managed to pass the test by answering more than 80 percent of the questions. They took my picture and my scores will be given to the TSL database. With that, the time had come to move from theory to practice.

The instructors took us to a neighboring room and instructed us to grab a red bag. Inside the bag we found harnesses to which we would be attaching fall arrest and safety gear. We were also outfitted with hard hats, gloves, safety glasses and a positioning lanyard. My harness was a standard size and I had to do a lot of cinching up to do in order to get it to fit, I'm a small guy. There was so much extra length that we had to tape up the excess to keep it close to me. This is an important practice when there are moving machine parts in your work area.

After gearing up we moved outside to a decommissioned oil derrick. Here we were to perform several of the climbing techniques that we had studied the previous day. One was called a monkey climb. This is an important technique to use when there is no fall prevention, for example if you are climbing a structure to establish a new safety line you would use this technique. After we ascended about half way up the derrick we would tie off using our positioning lanyard. This would let us let go of the structure with both hands and then lean back. We also practiced transferring from one fall arrest system to another. We would climb the structure using one system, position off, and then reach behind our heads to the dorsal d-ring located between our shoulder blades. For this transfer you had to first carefully cover your established fall arrest system, clip in the new one and then uncover and unclip your previous system.

This was followed by descents using rope riders. This is basically a variable friction device that you feed the rope through. Then you slowly walked down the side of the wall. It was important to get familiar with this device because we would be using it or a variation of it for each rescue practiced for the rest of the week.