By: Canadian Occupational Health & Safety News
April 13, 2010

TORONTO (Canadian OH&S News)

A window cleaner was saved by his fall arrest system after an equipment malfunction caused him to fall 19 storeys from a Toronto building.

On April 2 at about 2:45 pm, the worker employed by Premium Window Cleaning Ltd was on the roof of a 33-storey building preparing to use a bosun's chair to descend the side of the building, confirms Bruce Skeaff, a spokesman from Ontario's Ministry of Labour (MoL). At that point, the bosun's chair - a seat connected to a suspended line - became unhooked from the rope and fell away.

"The worker was left hanging from the ledge and lost grip with his hands and went into a freefall to the 15th floor," says Skeaff. "That's when the fall arrest system kicked in and the rope-grab locked." The worker suffered rope burns to his hands and was taken to St Michael's Hospital in Toronto.

The ministry was unable to disclose how long the worker was suspended in his harness, but Skeaff reports that the company has been issued a stop work order for not having a written emergency rescue procedure in place related to the fall arrest system. Part of the MoL investigation will focus on how the bosun's chair malfunctioned, Skeaff adds.

While the worker was saved in this case, falls from elevations represent a significant hazard. Information from the MoL website reports that one-quarter of all workplace fatalities are the result of falls, and the danger was made more apparent by the events of Christmas Eve last year. Five construction workers were working on scaffolding on the 13th storey of a Toronto building when "the scaffolding, known as a swing stage, separated in the middle and the workers fell to the ground below" (COHSN, January 11, 2010). Four of the workers died at the scene and the fifth suffered critical injuries.

In response to that tragedy, the MoL issued a hazard alert detailing safety procedures for suspended platform work, including proper training; use of fall arrest systems; proper design, construction, use and maintenance of the equipment; and inspections by competent workers and supervisors.

Suspended platforms, such as bosun's chairs, should not be mistaken for fall protection, cautions Andrew Sulowski, president of Sulowski Fall Protection Inc, a Toronto-based consulting firm. "[These] are called work-positioning systems," he says, explaining that while they enable window washers to do their job, they do not provide adequate protection from potentially fatal falls.

"The law requires that in addition to the work-positioning system, the window washer is equipped with a fall arrest system, which in this simple case will consist of another rope attached to the roof to a different anchor point," he explains. "That rope will usually have the fall arrester, and between the fall arrester and the harness there will be a lanyard, which is either energy-absorbing or not."

Sulowski suggests that workers should conduct a before-use inspection on their fall arrest systems. The worker should check to see if straps are cut or if there are any "stains of unknown origins" which may cause the usually soft webbing in the fall protection system to become hard and brittle. The worker should also make sure the metal D-ring at the back of the harness is not damaged, he adds.