Mountain NEWs: We spend a lot of time training with our safety gear. After all, a product is only as good as the knowledgeable person using it. From donning a harness to establishing anchor points at height, our crews are always trained for heightened awareness when it comes to safety (and if you aren’t, what are you waiting for?). Along with knowing the proper use and handling of fall protection items on site, workers also need to be aware of the dangers that occur after an incident happens, and how to quickly act.
2 comments:
I’ve heard about suspension trauma before, though never by name. My only understanding of it is that different harnesses have different risks in terms of suspension trauma. Before reading this article, I didn’t realize how little time it takes for a harness to become dangerous. Three minutes is a pretty short amount of time, especially if you need to figure out how to get a person down from wherever they are suspended from. The leg strap seems like a really good and simple solution for a serious problem. I assume that also it is important to have a plan for how to get people down if they do fall and are left hanging in a harness. I’ve never been in a situation where I’ve used harnesses frequently enough to have a good understanding of harness safety, but I’m glad I know about this before I’m working in harnesses frequently, which is not unlikely given that I’m going into the theater industry.
The last time I had to deal with harnesses was when my high school would have us do high ropes courses. When ever they were talking about safety they never mentioned this but that doesn’t really surprise me since if you fell you weren’t going to be in the air very long. That being said I can see why this would be an issue, even for those short periods of time it was possible to see how a harness would be capably of constricting your circulation. I agree with Julian that the add on strap that can act as a ledge to stand on seems like a nice simple way of combatting a problem like this. I think the main problem with it would be people having the presence of mind to use it. Especially since, going off the quote in the article, when people are in these situations suspension trauma doesn’t necessarily come up as an immediate danger in your mind.
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