Day 8: Hanging Around the Derrick

Day eight began with some warming up by going through our descents again. The rope rider is a neat device but can be difficult to work with. The springs are necessarily stiff, you need that friction, but they can be tough to open properly to feed your rope into. I must admit that walking yourself down the vertical side of an oil derrick is a great way to start the day.

I spent a bit more time looking around to see how I felt about the heights. They do the climbing training first thing in this program so that those who are uncomfortable with heights will realize this right away and don’t waste their time training for an industry that is fundamentally wrong for them. I wasn’t that high up, about 30 feet, but looking around you see open plains and farmland. The occasional grain elevator and road is visible from this height. And to the north I could count dozens of pinwheeling turbines, a great reminder of why I was up here. The phrase “don’t look down,” is actually pretty helpful at this height. The first few times I was up there, I was so absorbed with positioning myself properly and getting a good descent that I didn’t even think about the fact that I was a fatal distance from the earth. Yes, even 30 feet is said to be fatal.

Once everyone had practiced this controlled means of descent, the instructors demonstrated a direct rescue. Again this is when a fall victim is suspended in such a way that the rescuer can bodily reach out, with no danger to himself, and grab the d-ring sticking out from the victim’s back. The three phases of rescue are always the same. First you have “Set up and access:” get to the victim and get your anchors ready, these are what you’ll be using to transfer the victim to the lowering device. Then we have “Raise and transfer,” here you use a portable pulley system called a six-to-one to lift the victim off his fall arrest, the line that stopped his fall, then transfer the guy to lowering system. Lastly you have “tag and lower.” Tagging means you tie a rope to the guy and throw it down below, so the people on the ground can pull the victim clear of the structure, finally you lower the guy.

After the demo, we were split into teams and paired up. Each guy would take a turn being rescued and rescuing. But since only two guys, one from our team and one from the other team could be doing a rescue, the rest of us were left down on the ground to watch. I took advantage of this opportunity to see what guys did right and what they did wrong. Lots of time they forgot to tag the victim. I would also walk around silently mouthing the steps to myself on the ground. This previsualization was helpful, but when I got to the top my six-to-one jammed. The instructor had to get a second one for me. After this hitch I was able to finish the rescue, but I myself almost forgot to tag my man. Easy to do. It was almost a perfect rescue, except when I was repacking the rescue bag I improperly loaded the rope in the rope-rider. The instructor made me climb up and fix it. I was fairly lucky to get the rescue right my first time. A few guys failed it the first go round and we only got two chances to get it right.


After direct rescue we moved on to remote rescue. In this case you can’t reach the guy directly, like Mr. Brown over here, instead have to use a long extending pole in order to clip a new anchor line to his dorsal d-ring. The clip on the end is self closing and once it hooks into the d-ring it closes automatically. This can be a tricky operation; the self closing clip can close accidentally, the victim can be blowing around in the wind making him a moving target, and as I found out the next day, your clip can fall off the pole.