Laddering a Chimney (1978) [video]
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Dibnah
I'm British but was completely unaware of the early stuff he appeared in, but the late 90s, early 2000s stuff crept into the public consciousness.
Our equivalent of OSHA is "Health and Safety" and Fred held a dim view. Fortunately his legacy is continued by "British scaffolders" - a famous sub-group within construction, who you can still see to this day getting utterly shit-faced in a pub on cider over lunch, before returning to site.
Not sure if this division of construction labour exists elsewhere. If you pay a builder to so anything in the UK, they'll subcontract any erection of scaffolding to separate company, with a noticeably more cavalier attitude towards potential death and injury. Then your primary contractor will do the job, and the scaffolders will return to remove the infrastructure.
Ah least in France and Belgium, scaffolding is also generally erected by a specialised company (except very large public construction companies which do everything themselves, but then it's still separate services inside the company).
To be clear, Im not saying all scaffolders are dim ex cons. They are all extremely tough though...
Btw Fred Dibnah of the video was in a very different industry of steeplejacking. This required brains and was rather better paid.
Until then, having a good sized but not too large scaffolding inventory was something any construction company would have had, as well as the internal resources to mount and dismantle them.
Scaffolding is generally paid with a price (per square meter or in some cases per pipe/joint) for the installation, (usually) up to 1 month rent, and dismantling, then there is another price per month of the scaffolding being on site, a "pure rent" of the structure.
This latter tends (tended) to be remunerative (essentially beacuse there is no work involved in it, so it becomes essentially "interest on the cost of the scaffolding") and sort of monthly fixed recurring income.
If I recall correctly, the break even point was around 18-20 months, in some cases 24 months or two years, after which the scaffolding was paid for and the "rent" became just income.
More or less the same reasoning is (was) for site cranes (but also for other site equipment), that as well were once bought by the construction companies while nowadays they are almost invariably rented from some specialized companies.
I grew up around people like Fred (and they may have known him from his steam engine work) - good at hardware. Luckily software came along for me to not lose eyes and limbs to my job as would have been the case otherwise.
Fred Kummerow was another grave loss.
'Fortunately'?
I'm not up for prissiness and stupid rules but hefty metalwork being put in high places - there's nothing good about mixing alcohol with that.
Edit: I'll go further - I'm disturbed that you can endorse macho bullshit culture that can get themselves or worse, any bystanders, mashed up or killed.
what about parent's post was "macho" -- you think drinking is macho?
parent didn't say their gender
of course there is - just add alcohol! Voila, nao moar dangerous.
but do you have data on heights and alcohol?
emph on "over lunch", I interpreted it as hyperbole from someone from a less teetotaling culture
i'd guess 1-2 (2 for a heavier person) would not impair abilities at heights and could actually make someone less nervous
I worked in the construction industry in London in the late eighties and I witnessed builders drinking 6 pints in the half hour lunch and then going back to working at height with heavy machinery. I couldn't say anything.
Some parallels if you look at hardcore mode in Diablo genre of games. Builds heavily emphasize safety & being able to slow down situations enough to react to unknown risks. Like how Honnold talks about how free soloing isn't gym climbing so you should always be taking it slow & keeping three points of contact, not leaping for holds
It also sparked my interest for climbing, I'll give it a try for sure (with rope).
Today that’d never happen and you’d be sat in front of a judge. 30-40+ years ago where certainly different times in working class nw England. Maybe it’s because I grew up in it but looking back, back then it seems work was work, not pushing Jira tickets, one on ones, 360 degrees, agile, navigating office politics just to get shit done.
There’s a complete series about Fred on YouTube, well worth watching.
Back then, the amount of workers dying from work accidents was also an order of magnitude higher than it is today.
Individual surviving workers might have good memories of their job, but I'm not sure if it was actually better from a more general point of view.
I bet most, if not all, would do it with modern safety gear.
Out of the general population... not many people would go up that first ladder. Haha.
Mr. Dibnah is a master craftsman. he makes scaling this chimney look like a sunday stroll.
I'm starting to think they aren't real... everyone is so sure that "OSHA won't like [that which is about to be attempted]" and it hasn't ever stopped anyone from doing profoundly stupid stuff, except for new guys. Still, I've never seen them, been alerted to their presence, or met anyone who has (I've been asking for 20+ years.)
obviously they are real, but they are in no way the ever-present threat they are made out to be.
That being said, they're like the SEC (which only has around 4800) in that they heavily rely on employees (and incidental bystanders) to report unsafe worksites. The fact that you haven't had to interact with them is either a really good or really bad thing.
Every person on your site is a OHSA inspector in disguise.
I have never seen these prognostications come true. It really seems like it’s just a way for naysayers to rain on peoples parades, or appeal to authority as an way of stopping people from doing things when really they just don’t like them.
It leaves an extremely unpleasant taste in the mouth and it’s an absolute must to probe this kind of thing when interviewing candidates.
Or you know, i’m not going to die to maximise your profit. You go right ahead and circumvent sane and safe working practices as long as it is only your life on the line.
I’m talking about a random colleague seeing their peer wanting to do something and their reaction being “I don’t think you should do that because of a contrived reason which an auditor will say is against security / safety best practices.” Except they don't know this – their just making stuff up to be disruptive, show-off, sound-clever, boost their esteem, etc.
Bystanders whose sole contribution is to think of reasons not to do something — without taking responsibility for getting stuff done — are net-negative strong no-hires.
He would proudly promote that he would climb those towers after drinking pints of beer down the pub. He's a lovable person and I've watched nearly all of his TV work but safety was not his priority.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DMCSSMoPELU
More problematic than the work at heights, where the one at risk was mostly Fred himself.
Doing those chimney climbs safely, with fall protection, is pretty easy these days. It's so easy that I've seen videos of urban explorers, base jumpers, etc. using perfectly good fall protection, even while doing illegal things!
Remember we're looking at a video from 1978: modern fall protection gear simply wasn't widely available back then.
Do you folks feel that way?
It's less striking with videos like this, which I hadn't seen until a few years ago, when The Algorithm started pushing it.
They're a great watch!
"All that's left is shunning up the mast" - sorry, what? I'm just going to hide behind this sofa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnH7cw0ql1I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v74p0djZ_zc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g-bFr9qjDo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T00zEt1-3VA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am9e2Gq1jt4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPKvT52ZUi8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2rE5YIyoc0
*Other videos*
- [Fred Dibnah laddering a chimney (Part 1)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F04dGK1_wYA) - [Fred Dibnah laddering a chimney (Part 2)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-a27xwcLfU) - [Fred Dibnah How to climb a chimney overhang at 50+](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R3-YwDZrzg) - [Fred Dibnah How to erect a chimney scaffold](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W_7uIapoHc) - [Fred Dibnah Tribute (2004)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI4_OSS5F7k)
Is there a modern equivalent of those shows? Nothing comparable comes to mind.
Bottleneck I say? From limitation and oversight comes restraint and clever tricks, and that is a good way of making good media.
My most recent binge has been Perkins Builder Brothers, but also check out Essential Craftsman or Samson Boat Co. They lack some of the gravitas of the old guys, just because of their modern tone. But they're great.
There’s also a few plumbers unsticking drains (both sewer and storm) which is oddly fascinating.
The chimneys that Dibnah worked to demolish were usually attached to cotton mills in and around Manchester in North West England. The cotton industry was in steep decline there in the 1970s and 1980s and one by one these mills became unprofitable and closed down. Even if the mill building could be repurposed the chimney wasn’t needed and would be expensive to maintain.
I suspect Dibnah got the work because he was the cheapest and the mill owner would typically be very short of cash.
General point still stands though as most chimneys were demolished.
Climbing anchors need to withstand extreme loads as you could fall tens of feet before your fall is arrested and you load the anchor, plus the substrate is usually more strong than brick and mortar so you can make a much tighter (higher pressure) insertion before the wall crumbles.
It was the perfect example of not being intimidated by a big job: Just get at it and keep moving forward.
Falls from heights are a huge cause of workplace deaths in construction: https://www.osha.gov/fall-protection
It doesn't take much height to do so: https://cdn1.hardhattraining.com/wp-content/uploads/how-high...
Any time an employer or company encourages you to take risks or pressures you to not observe safety regulations, find another job, fast. Your life is not less important than profits or productivity. Ever.
Edit: not impressed at all. This guy is an asshole - aside from the fact that multiple clips show him picking something off chimneys or towers, giggling, and throwing them casually off - here he is laughing about how he and a coworker purposefully dumped a bucket of cement water off the top of a tower and came down to found they'd damaged a guy's nice sports car. Which he thinks his hilarious: https://youtu.be/ezX_o0H5FuE?t=217
I'd guess falls from higher heights are more deadly, but less likely (you're more likely to use fall protection on a 8 story roof than a 1 story roof, I'd guess; and there's also a lot more 1 story roofs than 8 story roofs)
The risks they took built society.
If you think "Bullshit Jobs" is real then I hope you realise that's exactly you. These men are doing real work. And the idea they could just get other work is pretty insulting.
How much OH&S should be done in today's society is complicated. But what still keeps society running is a whole class of men doing hard dangerous work.
(And this an awful example about working from heights, that kicks in at 7 feet. The fact it start low is what matters. He is doing speciality work which is totally seperate and obvious he'd die)
They are/were more passionate than anyone about safety in building, because they have literally seen people killed when safety was poor.
Doing them in a dangerous, cavalier way? Not really. A bridge isn't really improved in any way if 20 people die falling from it during construction.
And yeah, maybe that kind of thing made the bridge noticeably cheaper, but was it cheaper really when you account for the effects those deaths had? We pay less for the bridge, then pay more for funerals, compensations, negative effects that workers dying had... it's just nowhere in the bill for the bridge.
I worked in a British company (that had a warehouse) in an office as an IT contractor, and in the 3-storied office all stairwells were full of posters telling me I should hold the handrails and that kind of completely pointless garbage.
> It doesn't take much height to do so: https://cdn1.hardhattraining.com/wp-content/uploads/how-high...
does a really poor job of conveying the relative risks - and presumably these incidents are generally occurring when workers are following the rules which isn’t confidence inspiring.
The other thing to note is that most people who fall from height are 'unskilled workers' (remembered stat, I held a Construction Safety Certification Scheme gold card in the past) . Ie, they shouldn't have been up there in the first place. Typically people plucked out of the pub to become 'roofers'. Iirc falling through skylights was the number one cause. While we value cheap labour, safety will always be second best
Here is the full link
https://cdn1.hardhattraining.com/wp-content/uploads/how-high...
If you want to attack Fred, maybe attack his selfish devotion to his hobbies at the expense of his family, but not for having an attitude to health and safety that was somewhat normal for the era he worked in.