The drill tower's fall arrest system is a line on a drum with a brake, and it logs every arrest with the load and the height, because a line that has taken a fall is a line that goes for inspection. Ours logs an arrest from the fourth floor window at about a hundred kilos, most weeks, at night, with the tower locked, and the line is found paid out to the ground in the morning.
I am the station's training officer, and the drill tower's equipment is inspected by me.
How the fall arrest works.
The line runs from a drum at the top of the tower, and a trainee at a window clips on. If they fall, the drum locks and the brake takes the load, and the logger records the arrest: the load, the drop, the time. After an arrest the line is inspected and the drum reset, and the log is the record of every fall the system has ever caught.
With nobody clipped on there is no load, and the log is quiet.
Most weeks, at night, the log records an arrest.
About a hundred kilos, from the height of the fourth floor window, at about two in the morning. The tower is locked at ground level and the windows are shuttered, and there is nobody on it.
In the morning the line is paid out to the ground, the way it is after an arrest, and the drum has locked, and I reset it.
A hundred kilos from the fourth floor is a firefighter in kit going out of a window. The drop logged is the drop from the sill to the point the brake bites, which is the same drop every time, to the centimetre, and it is the drop the system takes when a person falls clipped on from that sill.
What has been checked.
The drum and brake. Serviced and then replaced, and the new unit logged an arrest in its first week.
The line. Inspected after every logged arrest, as the procedure requires, and it shows the wear of an arrest: the sheath scuffed at the point the brake bit, a little more each time, and I have replaced the line three times because of it.
The tower. Locked, shuttered, alarmed at the door, and the alarm quiet on the nights it happens.
The camera on the yard, which sees the tower's face. The line is coiled at the top at midnight and paid out to the ground at three, and between those frames, on the recording, nothing goes out of the fourth floor window, and the line pays out on its own, fast, the way it pays out under a falling weight, and stops with the jerk of the brake, and hangs.
The window.
The fourth floor window is the one the drill uses for the ladder rescue, and it is the window a man went out of on this tower in 1979, on a drill, before there was a line, and the tower has a plaque at the base that I walk past every day.
What is done about it.
The log is inspected and the line is inspected and the arrests are recorded as unwitnessed activations, which is a phrase I chose because the alternative was a phrase I could not put on a form.
The brigade's equipment engineer has seen the log and the worn lines and the camera and has recommended a full replacement of the system, which has been done, twice.
What I do.
I run the drills.
The one thing I have changed is that on ladder drills to the fourth floor I clip the trainee on myself, from inside, at the sill, and I do not let go of the line until they are on the ladder.
The reason is a drill in the autumn when I was at the fourth floor window with a trainee clipped on and about to step out onto the ladder, and the line was slack in my hand, as it should be, and it went tight. Not from the trainee, who had not moved. From above, at the drum, the line pulled up and out through the window, hard, with a hundred kilos on it, and paid out, past us, to the ground, and the brake bit, and the logger recorded an arrest from the fourth floor at the moment the trainee and I were both standing inside the window with our feet on the boards.