31.01.2013

Death Wish of the Year

With another year of being inundated with Death Wishes we thought we would take the pick of the bunch and give you the chance to vote for the best – by which we definitely mean the very worst – Death Wish of 2012.

Although the Death Wish is a popular element on Vertikal.net, the blatant disregard for human safety is worrying, as is the volume of examples we get sent every week. We cannot stress enough the importance of working safely at height and that safety should not be compromised for ANY reason as we all know the consequences can be fatal!

We hope the combination of naming and shaming as well as highlighting exceptionally poor practice gets people thinking about how they carry out work at height. The reports are also widely used for training. We certainly do not condone these pictures, however the sheer audacity and level of intuitiveness in some has to be admired!

Listed below is our Top 10 Death Wishes for 2012 which is followed by the voting poll.

1. Flipping mad!
The four Filipino men who are in the process of dismantling a scaffold 15 metres off the ground, wearing nothing but flip-flops, makes for one of the dodgiest prefabricated scaffold systems we have ever seen.
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One of the dodgiest prefabricated scaffold systems we have ever seen

2. A tandem lift with a difference
A tandem lift with a difference is used in Taiwan to lift a boat into the water. Clearly the crane company felt that the LTM1500 needed some help to manage the lift, so it place a second crane with a luffing jib behind it and hooked it up to the boom nose of the LTM1500 to assist...Madness!
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A tandem lift, but not as we know it... or is it a superlift?

3. Biggest ladder idiot
The winner of Ladder Association’s ‘Idiots on Ladders’ campaign shows a man reaching up to the top of a chimney with a gaping fall directly below him. As if this isn’t bad enough his ladder still did not reach high enough to keep him from stretching upwards.
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The Ladder Association's ladder idiot of the year winner

4. Demolition Death Wish
A quick glance of this video clip and you can be forgiven for believing that it is an extremely well doctored clip that are often seen going ‘viral’. A closer examination and this video really is a dangerous as it looks!

5. Scaffold and ladders
A man using a ladder and tower combination in Mexico that warrants a ‘spot the problem(s)’ competition. There is literally so much wrong with this picture that we are not even going to bother addressing it – the picture says it all really!
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On a busy corner in Coatepec, Mexico

6. Window cleaning freestyle
A video of a man cleaning windows in the UK without any access equipment or sanity apparently makes the cut. Click the play button to start the video.

Extreme Window Cleaning

7. Mobile scaffold tower
Another ‘spot the problem(s)’ competition contender sees an unusual form of trailer mounted access equipment in the US. Given that the user could fall while climbing, fall through the platform planks while working, or even have the whole set up fall off the trailer, it no wonder why this Death Wish has made the Top 10.
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Spot the errors...a closer look reveals how unsafe this set up really is

8. Death Wish chimney
Here is a video of a Death Wish which might just steal the crown! Apparently filmed in China, the video shows a lone man taking down a tall smoke stack/chimney. Fortunately he is wearing a harness but what it is anchored to is anyone’s guess! We are also intrigued to know how he gets up there each day with his long handled sledge hammer...

9. Double pallet and ladder
We have all seen the forklift and pallet trick before but in this particular case the man seen in the picture has used a water tank pallet, topped by another with an empty cage in order to rest his ladder.
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Even at the top of the ladder our man is having to stretch

10. A Death Wish storey
The YouTube video amusingly entitled ‘OSHA training film from Bombay’. Traditionalists might think that these are highly skilled scaffolders continuing an age old tradition however this particular example earned itself the title of being the first Death Wish to be labelled a ‘Death Sentence’!