09.12.2005

The good the bad and the …..

Last week a platform operator was tipped out of his aerial lift basket due to bad practice, the good news is he was wearing a harness that saved his life; the whole ugly thing was caught on camera.
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Up she comes, nice and steady

English Heritage, which manages the historic building, had collected the £1,500 needed to fund the tree, a 25ft Norwegian spruce, from contributions by local enterprises. (there was no tree last year) Amey contract services kindly offered to help raise the traditional Christmas tree onto the ramparts of Carlisle castle last Friday. While the gesture was highly commendable, the method used was as bad as it gets.

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Almost there lads...

The company turned up with a Versalift Eurotel 38NF van mounted platform with fibreglass cage. The seven metre tree was attached with a nylon rope to the finger guard of the lifts fibreglass basket!

The lifts platform capacity is 200kgs, the operator, not the sveltest of individuals, must have taken up at least half of that, and the tree?? another 350 kgs? Certainly a good 200 plus percent of capacity and most of it concentrated at least 300mm beyond the normal loading point of the centre of the basket, increasing the overlading.
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Somethings giving

The operator raised the tree almost to the top of the ramparts and then……. One of the levelling bars appears to have given way and bang! The basket rotated by over 90 degrees.
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Whoops.. there she goes..

The Good thing was that the operator was sensibly wearing a harness with a short lanyard.

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Thank you harness!

As a result he was safely retained in the platform and just had to hang on while his colleagues, and there were fortunately a fair few of them, lowered him embarrassingly to the ground. He walked away uninjured.
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Time to get out of here and clean up!

We would like to thank Stuart Walker for supplying these photographs; they are copyrighted, so please contact us if you wish to use them.

Including, Cumbria County Council, Carlisle City Council, the Border Regiment, the Border Regiment Museum and the Cumbria Cadet Force