Lifeline (Safety)

Every year we have to carry out maintenance at height, in the roof area, and we always wonder about the use of the lifeline. The line needs a 50 m wide and about 3 m of height.

We asked more than one company specializing in security for a proposal to implement this, but they all told us that it would be a complex and extremely expensive structure.

Then we devised a plan to implement this structure, knowing:

i)? We could not have a large harness cable to minimize the free fall space and thus minimize high forces/tensions on the cables – knowing that a small cable limits movements? => necessarily less than 3 m, we opted for 1 meter.

?ii)??We should maximize the sag of the cable to minimize the tension on the lifeline cable keeping in mind the effects of falling from height => we opted by a sag of 1 m.

?iii)??Doing some calculations, considering one meter of arrow, we obtained traction forces in the surrounding cable (54 kN) with a torque on the support posts of (16 ton) – which we tried to compensate by anchoring the support posts at the top.

?iv)??We researched cables and support posts whose characteristics allow these traction forces.

Unfortunately, we never implemented the project (which we intended to test previously with a weight of 80 kg) and decided to build a fixed structure around the intervention site.

#Safety