Film Industry's Latest Mission - Should they choose to accept it

It’s the big day and time to build the bridge. Everyone onsite is ensuring their specific responsibilities are, or will be, met. This began with our start of day COVID-19 check by the onsite medic. It's all good & no-one seems to be bringing the virus to site, at least not today. We’re all aware of Tom Cruise’s rather serious ‘chat’ with the crew at Leavesden studios and I’m fully onboard with his sentiment. With a wife at home who’s classed as Highly Vulnerable I’ve been taking steps to keep an eye on the spread of the virus ever since the first two cases were discovered in Chita, the administrative centre of the eastern?Siberian?territory Zabaykalsky Krai in Russia, having found out from a friend there. I don’t want COVID in my house and I’ve been very careful well before Boris Johnson finally woke up and attempted to lessen the impact of the virus in the UK.

My remit is Work at Height Safety and the provision of Rescue Cover supervising a small team of industrial abseilers who have been brought in to do what we do best. I’m looking forward to creating and emailing the Orca Access Services invoices for this contract with such an unusual heading and getting this utterly surreal job into my IRATA Logbook. It beats my previous favourite entry when I worked on the Willy Wonker ride at Alton Towers in 2006 by a country mile.

There’s a lot of steel that needs lifting and bolting together from the top of the 212-foot cliff to a concrete pad on a shelf half way up. This pad was the first task done by myself and another rope access technician a few weeks previously. We’d then worked with a surveyor to ensure that the concrete was in the right place. When the full-size 70-ton train comes thundering off the bridge it must land in a carefully calculated spot. It’s a one-take wonder, no room for error as there’s a lot riding on this bridge, literally. Chris McQuarrie, or McQ as he's known on set, wants to make movie history by doing something that's not been done since Bridge on the River Kwai. Apparently similar train crashes in both The Fugitive and Back to the Future Part 3 are very good scale models, but not full sized trains.

I’m in my 22nd year dangling from ropes “as thin as your little finger”, the description given by a Canadian to the guy who got me into the marvellous world of Industrial Rope Access. I’ve done many, many different jobs to get here. I’ve aligned lasers from one building to another for digital transmission of data in Nottingham, installed a radar array in The Caribbean Sea offshore in Trinidad. I’ve done what’s akin to coal mining in the reactor at Coryton Refinery fixing ‘The Cat Cracker’ in record time to the refinery’s delight by applying all these years of experience to that and every job I do. Dangling daily 600 miles north of The Arctic circle in Norway was fun too, and even further up in The Barents Sea at one point. It’s a very, very long list which can be summed up in just a few simple numbers – 12,000+ rope hours. It’s my flying time and gives me the experience to tackle just about any access problem these days. It's also extremely rewarding and much more fun than when I was a computer programmer, working with computers for 15 years when I first left school.

I’ve also done quite a lot of steel erection, at Old Trafford in 2006 and Norwegian shipyards many years later. Lifting heavy loads is another area of expertise, the BIG stuff from 10-ton gantries in more than one sports stadium, deep inside the boiler house of an Irish peat fuelled power station and several bridges to the compensators used on semi-submersible drilling rigs, again over in Norway. I have what’s been described as an encyclopaedic memory, which is incredibly useful. It’s no good if all the years of experience are just faded memories.

My gut instinct is talking to me and I’m not entirely comfortable with how things are being done on this particular day here at Darlton Quarry. It’s a big lift and it’s complicated. I don’t feel fully up to speed with the precise steps at least not in the formal Pre-Job Brief way I’m used to doing when I’m offshore on an oil rig. I have a quick chat with some of the other companies here and they aren’t fully clued up either. So, what does Pete do? He presses the pause button and insists that everyone gathers together for a verbal run-through before we start. The Site SFX Supervisor worked on Gladiator, Saving Private Ryan, Zero Dark Thirty and Blackhawk Down to name but a few and I don’t think he’s best pleased with my insistence that we bring everyone together and delay the job. It’s taken some time to get the cranes into position and the huge recovery truck where it needs to be, but the name Peter means ‘A Rock’ and it’s rather appropriate methinks. I’ve done the same thing on other contracts when my gut feeling was bad. There was one day when I was really unhappy about how things were being done and didn’t vocalise it enough. I did to a certain extent, but not enough. It’s only by either the Grace of God or bloody good luck that my very good friend Andreas, a fantastic German abseiler, wasn’t killed, in a very, very horrible body mangling way. Bucket and shovel territory. I have no desire to end up pointing at a corpse saying, “There you go, that’s what I meant when I said I wasn’t happy with the way we’re doing things”. No pleasure in being right when you’re telephoning Mrs Thingy to advise her, she’s now a widow.

This is why I’m on the set. This is why they’re paying me. I refuse to merely be a Ticked Box, and although stepping forward and saying, “Hang on for a moment”, if you pardon the pun (climber’s humour), in a polite and professional manner can be incredibly hard, that’s the way I’m wired and it’s a ‘non-negotiable’. If you want a Yes-Man, hire someone else, and order some body bags.

So, here’s my point, finally, lol. I recently read Rory Kinnear’s BBC interview with Sophie van Brugen and it was music to my ears. He'd said "Film sets nowadays are starting to look more and more like construction sites - all the rigging, towers, cranes... every minute of every day you're on a film set you will encounter dangers that you may not have been educated about and the film industry needs to take proper responsibility for that."

Yup, exactly. He hit the nail squarely on the head and bringing in industry experts is the way to go. Paul Biddis is a great example of this. An ex-para who’s now keeping film and TV safe with his wealth of military experience.

There are so many things that need to be considered and I’m pretty sure currently that they aren’t on many film sets. For example, I have suspicion that there are hundreds, if not thousands of harnesses, karabiners, anchor slings and lifting strops that shouldn’t be used. TV & Film might be the last Wild West of industry. Steeplejacks were brought kicking and screaming into the real world a few years ago. It’s not just use, storage and inspection of Work at Height equipment it’s training of their correct use too. Fall Arrest Harnesses are used incorrectly every single day, without anyone realising it. Well, that is until someone falls and it prevents them hitting the ground but seriously injures the user in the process, simply because they weren't actually using it properly in the first place. I’ve even contacted the UK’s HSE recently as the advice on their webpage Work at height in theatres has incorrect harness advice on it. I’m keeping an eye out for the page to be changed. It needs to be because it’s wrong.

I began industrial abseiling in 2001, worked as an IRATA Level 1 for 3 years before moving on to Level 2 in 2004 when I had to re-certify as a L1 again or advance. Mirroring my days at work it was time to go up. Another 3 years as a Level 2, then again moved up when I had to either re-certify again as a L2 or become a Supervisory Level 3. I’ve had 5 Level 3 recertifications now, in fact I will need a new logbook in 2025.

I started Orca Access Services in 2012 with a rather unique business model and now have a brilliant team offering highly competitive rates for a 5-Star service. Access Consultancy is a specialist area of ours offering industry the knowledge and experience gained during all these years of dangling safely. You tell us where you need to get to and we'll tell you the safest way to do it. It might be industrial rope access, it might be MEWPs, it might be cradles or a working platform or it could be via scaffold. As I’ve been saying, literally, for years now there are No Problems, Just Solutions and Orca Access Services offers the safest and most appropriate ones!