With fly systems you shouldn't be waiting until the once or twice a year that a professional comes in and inspects the
system. Any fly operator, be it a student, volunteer, or professional should be trained to keep their eyes open for any unsafe situations. About 2 months ago (during our last show, Midsummer) one of my crew came down from the fly
rail and told me that the
purchase line for one of my electrics was starting to fray. You don't have to be a certified rigger to be able to tell when something is starting to fall apart and/or become unsafe. The other thing is that your operators NEED to tell you when something is wrong, they should never watch a frayed
purchase line go by and not tell someone.
Over the past season, we have been in the process of replacing/updating our fly
system. It just happened that this
lineset was still an old hemp
purchase line. It was not hard, nor time consuming to fix as we had all the parts on
hand, and now we are back in safe operational status. We will be changing out the last of the old hemp lines and old arbors this summer. (we are all sick of hemp splinters!)
LD4Life said:
Yikes! Good glory am I glad I've never had to deal with that before. My closest was a newbie tech not clamping an unbalanced
arbor and then letting go of it. Fellow senior lighting tech ripped most of the skin off of his palms trying to stop it (which he did). Still has scars from it.
This is a very bad thing. You should NEVER try to grab and stop a running
line with your hands. For one thing, you don't want to do what your friend did, but it could also have been much worse. I know that your instinct is to grab the
line, but running linesets have so much momentum that they can
throw you off the
rail or lift you up to
grid. In either of those situations you wouldn't get a second chance as the most likely result is death.
EQUIPMENT CAN BE REPLACED, LIVES CANNOT!
As also was mentioned, you shouldn't be trying to move unbalanced linsets. That, in and of itself has bad idea written all over it. Having your
lineset out of weight makes it that much more dangerous if the
purchase line breaks. I have seen bad fly
system accidents, and I know people who have been involved in worse.
Going back to the OP, at the very least, the
lineset in question should be chained off until it can be fixed, as you have proven first
hand that ropes break. This is very similar to electrical
LOTO procedures. All it takes is one stupid person to
walk up to that fly
system and say "Hmmmm, what is all this tape for?" rip it off and then try to use it. The only result will be bad things.