Trapped in Palm| skirt failure| palm rescue

shaggs

G'day all,
With all the talk of palms around here I thought I'd post this from youtube.
Not a bad video. We can cut it to shreds I guess but lets hope we think about it next time we tackle "the most deadly vegetation of all" (sorry)

dannyboysfc

I posted that video a while back on a palm thread. Worth thinking about before you go shimying up one of those things.

playfordtree

Yeh, i remember seeing that when you posted it danny, scary stuff.

I thought maybe it was an "old wives tale" so it was good to see it was not!

Thanks for the reminder shaggs

I'm constantly amazed by the skill and dedication of firefighters, they climb up those "freakin" huge ladders, no tie in, loaded up with gear and then have to deal with a distressed and or injured person at the top.

Then something like this happens.


Here's to firefighters

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TreeSpecialist

The guy was lucky he didn't die. Frequently when palms shed the huge bundle of dead fronds, they land on the climbers head in such a way as to make it difficult to breathe. Try it by having someone push your head down to your chest with a couple of hundred pounds of weight. Your trachea becomes restricted and you can't breathe.

Any palm with more than a 2 year's worth of dead fronds (1 year's worth in some tropical locales) should be trimmed using a bucket or lift device.

This guy was also lucky that someone noticed him up the tree - the original story I read said he was working alone.

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gump

lucky alright.
have heard of a few stories of people having bad experiences with those types of palms.

they could of used a bucket truck, the fire ladder had a perfect reach!

gump

and it was now where near fully extended.

shaggs

Sorry boys for the double posting. Some good info there.
Whilst you brought up fireys falls, heres a weird one!!!

JohN Dee

Hmmm, I just found this video on Youtube and watched it, thought I would post it up but it already has been ^^^ so I'll just bump up this thread again..

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Apocalypsse

And thats why we have a tower and a polesaw for jobs like that.

JohN Dee

Some jobs like that just arn't profitable if you have to hire a tower (if you own one that's a different story). These palms are where ladders are incredibly useful in our industry.

Simple get a ladder that will get you to the top, climb up in just your harness with your rope and prussic, either attach a cambium saver at the top or a pulley - attach yourself to the friction/spike saver system and remove the ladder and work from the top down. Try to keep the crap on your harness to a minimal and tight so you don't trip going up the tree, things like chainsaws and flip lines can be gotten later.

I have heard of some people just using a bowline with a long tail, but if you've gotta climb back up that is going to be a PITA.

Oh and I guess an SRT would work kind of OK with this type of work too.

All in all don't climb these bad boys from the bottom up.

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We are what we repeatedly do... Excellence then, is not an act, but HABIT...

Red : Green : Blue

Oldtimer

Just a couple of questions;
Was that climber tied to a rope or was he just on a ladder when the top of the palm came down?

There is a rope showing on the video final descend but it is not clear if it was put there as a safety by the Rescuers or was it part of his original climbing gear.
Amazing he just didn't drop all the way down when the mess came off the palm tree originally.
One final Observation; No helmet or any visible safety gear and the rescuers did not try to put a helmet on him prior to start cutting the mess off.
Who needs That anyway!!


P.S. Oh well, I guest he got lucky and gets to tell the story to his family this time.

letigre

thats where heavy throwballs and throwlines come in. for big palms, i do a lot of phoenix palm pruning for example, the line gets blown away from the centre really easy. and you need the extra weight to get the ball to run through the fronds. a good trick is to do the palm in two halves. srt up having set a pulley in the rope with a alpine butterfly and your climbing line through. change over to ddrt and work a quarter of the tree in each direction using your flipline to continue around. about half way, sometimes less, your rope angle becomes too great and you cant get comfy so come down and do the whole thing again (or else have two systems in place at the beginning, but i dont have enough gear for that.) beatiful thing about srt, it takes no effort so you can approach tree work in an entirely different way. by far the easiest spikeless palm technique ive used.

def think ladders are the go too tho.

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