How to lift people?

[shiben]

A bit off-topic, but IMO the potential to lose your balance is WAY higher on the top two steps. 1) You have nothing to hold onto with your hands as you get onto these steps, and 2) when on a ladder you typically brace your shin against the next steps, giving you three points of contact.

But if your halfway careful you can easily use every step of the ladder. And FWIW, the only time I have fallen off a ladder is when I tried to overreach halfway up a 12' ladder. Plenty of space above and below for bracing. I just lost my balance. The point is, you can fall off of any ladder at any time. Anything can break at any time. Even the gear that the top flying people in the country use has the potential (abet a small one) to fail spontaneously and randomly, due to tiny, non-detectable visually problems in the alloy. Pretty much the entire exercise is minimizing risk, and thats probably why they dont want you on a chain hoist. It minimizes the risk.

 

[Footer]

But if your halfway careful you can easily use every step of the ladder. And FWIW, the only time I have fallen off a ladder is when I tried to overreach halfway up a 12' ladder. Plenty of space above and below for bracing. I just lost my balance. The point is, you can fall off of any ladder at any time. Anything can break at any time. Even the gear that the top flying people in the country use has the potential (abet a small one) to fail spontaneously and randomly, due to tiny, non-detectable visually problems in the alloy. Pretty much the entire exercise is minimizing risk, and thats probably why they dont want you on a chain hoist. It minimizes the risk.

....and more importantly, when it fails, they can say its not meant for that!

 

[shiben]

....and more importantly, when it fails, they can say its not meant for that!

Didnt say who's risk was being minimized! ;-) And lets be honest, all kinds of lifting devices get used for lifting people in ways never intended and far more dangerous. I saw this show about Oil rigs and they transfer crews to ships using cranes and a cargo net hooked onto a little platform. Everyone holds on and away they go. And people walk trusses held up by chain hoists often. People ride the vortex lift up to focus instead of bumping. People use stuff for lifting themselves all the time that its not designed for per se. And it usually works fine until someone dies and someone else needs to put a new label on their widget. However, I guess to me the idea of using a chain hoist to lift a person, a la hook the hook to your dorsal attachment and pull up, is kind of outrageous, if your going to hook an access point up use a climbing rope and ascended rig, much cheaper. Or rig a circus ladder, also cheaper and easy to climb. Just remember the fall arrest system. A hoist is just silly to use for lifting a person to an overhead position. So I guess in my view, its a silly situation not because it wont work (lets be honest, it probably will work great for pulling a person into the air), it just seems to be way more complicated than it needs to be. I highly doubt a multi ton chain hoist would be dangerous in that it might fail in this application, however.

 

[shiben]

Thanks for all the input. I created this thread because of a situation that arose during a load in of Into the Woods. We had two large trees that created a proscenium and the points where the limbs attached to the trunk were at least 16 feet off the deck. The venue had no ladders that I felt safe climbing (old rickety wooden things that wouldn't handle my 210lbs) and one of the house guys suggested hooking up a truss to two motors so I could ride it up and attach the limbs. Since the motors said not to lift people, I didn't go up, and we were able to borrow a genie from another local theater. But the proposition got me thinking about such lifting techniques...

See this is an example of "WAY overthinking it". The time and effort taken to instal 2 hoists, rig a truss, and fly it out is gigantic compared to the cheaper and easier way of dealing with this problem, which is (given no lift or ladders), drop a rope and rappel down. Drop a second rope to pull stuff up. With proper rappelling technique, you should be able to work fairly easily with the situation at hand. What Rigger? will probably pop in here sooner or later and denounce this as unsafe without proper training, so you should probably get that training too. However, that just seems like an easier way to do it, and possibly safer?

 

[Esoteric]

Infinitely safer with proper training Shiben. Because you would be doing what the equipment was actually meant to do.

 

[shiben]

Infinitely safer with proper training Shiben. Because you would be doing what the equipment was actually meant to do.

Right. Basically my point was this method is cheaper and safer, putting limbs on a tree using a chain hoist elevator is really way more work than I as a technician want to do and way more work than rappelling. I understand loading truss spot ops, but thats really a bit different, IMO. Loading 6 guys on the truss with their gear is not using it as a scaffold, and so the situation is a bit different.