UK Arb Association's Diabolical Webinar on Twin Rope

[TC]

Words cant express just how bad this video is. If you can manage to get through 5 mins of this you deserve some kind of medal. There's health and safety bureaucrats, 'technicians', so called 'climbing experts' demonstrating 'approved methods'. This is about as far away as you could get from the free spirited grassroots, organic, creative, imaginative, innovative world of treeclimbing we all know. This is what happens when you allow bureaucrats to dictate to your industry and it's absolutely miserable.

Skip through it, I dare you.....

 

[Alexthetreesurgeon]

Thanks for posting this. As a London uk arborist I’m really interested to hear what people on here think about this.....

 

[CjM]

Maybe we'll need two steering wheels now to drive commercial vehicles more safely.

 

[CjM]

I skipped through a lot of it, and maybe I missed it, but they state that there were 23 falls from height between 2016-2018 with workers on a single line. Are these incidents the direct result of workers on a single line, and would a back up system (as opposed to a positioning lanyard) have prevented the falls?

I'm genuinely curious to hear more about how that statistic is relevant and not fallacious. Just because a majority of these accidents caused serious injury is a strange primary reason to change the regs, as opposed to understanding the root cause of those accidents. What behaviors caused these accidents, and how do these changes address those behaviors? Not sure that was really touched on in this video.

 

[HigherGroundArborist]

I’m always up for a challenge. This video is a great example of why we don’t need the government to tell us how to do our jobs and live our lives. They said in 2016-2018 there were 23 accidents involving a fall in a tree, 1 was fatal. Of the hundreds of arborists in the UK who performed thousands of climbs during that time, there were probably more climbers injured in a car accident than there were from climbing. The bottom line is you can’t regulate all the inherent risk out of our job. You can and should educate as much as possible. But when it comes right down to it, I would like to give the climber the final say in how he needs to safely climb a tree. He’s an adult, and he doesn’t need some pencil pusher sitting behind a desk to tell him how to do his job.

 

[CjM]

The flip side is that I'm glad for some oversight- would not have wanted to be a coal miner or factory worker before labor laws, regulations. I just want to see reasonable and well thought out regulations, no matter where they are.

 

[ghostice]

In listening to the Arb Assoc rep's presentation I found myself ticking a bunch of boxes in the "kinda do that already" column. However, the regulatory logic to me was very flawed. Also the training folks must be rubbing their hands in glee counting all the training dollars that'll be a windfall to them. Lots of self interest there. I have one great objection to what the Arb rep discussed - that is they had meetings with IRATA/ SPRAT types. What about commercial rock climbing/ alpine guides and commercial caving operations. These certainly are other "two dimensional" rope access disciplines that were not even on their radar. Foul! Also I have said before, the statistics that I have seen that were supposed drivers are abysmal in the amount of detail they provided on arb accidents. Garbage in, garbage out. However, this WILL change a lot of things going forward - from harness design to mandated qualifications/ forehead stampings and requirements for rescue training etc etc. In Canada expect arborists "Red Seal" qualification to be pressed for and the like. Wow, maybe even an arborists union (sarcasm). Hope customers are going to be ready to pay big time for tree work 'cuz you sure aren't going to be in business at $500.00 day rate per person after all the dust settles. My 2 cents.