CORRECTION Hoisting Equipment CORRECTION

Last week I put some information that clearly needs some clarification and correction as pointed out by one of our readers. Captain John Chevalier of the Hope Jackson Fire Department sent me an informative email that caused me to pause and issue this clarification this week.

Thanks John for your insight and making sure our members are always kept safe. I Appreciate it!

There are a couple of issues that came up and I will address them as individual items.

Utility Rope

I used the term and my definition may not have matched everyone's definition. A utility rope is a rope that has been downgraded from a life line. It is a rope that is not used for life safety purposes. This should not be confused with that piece of manila you have laying in grease and oil in the back of the rear compartment on pumper # 1! This line should have a decent working strength to be tasked for hoisting the equipment you are trying to lift. A general safety rule is whatever the tensile strength was divided by 15 (fifteen) should give you a reasonable safety factor. Again you should not be trying to hoist much more weight than personnel on top can lift so lets be realistic. The largest weight factor is probably the charged hoseline with the weight of the water.

Tag Lines

Tag lines can be confused in the context I used them and I will now clarify. Anytime you are practicing and training with ropes every item lifted should have an additional line on it so that each object has two lines. The instructor should always support the object correctly and further inspect the knots that were tied to prevent objects from coming loose falling and potentially injuring students. In addition when hoisting equipment tag lines cannot also be used to describe the lines managed from the ground that keep the object away from the building. They allow a ground person to pull the object slightly away from the structure. The major point is that any object raised for training should have a second line for safety purposes/

Cylinders and Extinguishers.

John correctly pointed out that hoisting pressure cylinders such as SCBA and extinguishers is currently being shied away from by IFSTA and other training organizations. Further there are actually some OSHA standards about hoisting pressurized cylinders. I said what I said in the bulletin as I am of the belief that if I can teach a student to tie a rope around himself and lower him, that also could have some catastrophic circumstances in a failure as well! In addition by carrying a device such as this up a ladder you risk not maintaining three points of constant contact with the ladder when doing that. John is correct and maybe we should eliminate that off our list of items to practice with because it could be too risky. I will leave it up to the department training officers to make some determinations but be forewarned and cautioned that it is not a commonly accepted practice and those things that I might do are not risks you should be trying.

My intent for these training's is ultimately the safety of all participants and when I make an error or am not clear as last week, I need to get that info back out to you as well.

Thanks for your input and stay safe.