UKC

Not sure how these forms work. I just finished making a short vid about a 40 ft ground fall and wanted to send it off into cyber space...

youtube.com/watch?v=PnvvVXvfP6s&

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

You might want to invest in some helmets.

Glad the climber was ok

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

What was the gear that ripped, and why did you think it ripped? (I'll admit I found it hard to pay attention to 30 seconds of video padded out to 8 minutes with banter )

In reply to Chris_Donovan:
Nasty!... Hope the climber has fully recovered... and thinks about wearing a helmet at least on trad.
The fall height looks more like 30ft, and perhaps the impact is done on full rope stretch so that's why the climber bounced a little, you see (slow mo around 7.10) his harness tie in point holds him up a touch but because his body has flipped side ways his hip side area and upper body get quite a bang... perhaps the ground was a little bouncy, often the case in woods, but often rocks in it too.
Not sure if he actually shielded his head with arm, or if he was lucky that it came accross his head when flipped, i suppose its instinct, especially when you don't know where you are going.
It was a very close shave.

When things turn out worse, and you read about it in the papers, with hardly any info other than that someone had a fatal climbing accident, it's not very helpful.

I mean in any industry, colleagues want to know what happened in case we can learn something, and it is made available for that purpose. This is not rubber necking. The same should happen in climbing accidents.

I think it is useful to know if gear ripped / failed / knot failed / harness incorrectly done / bolt / peg failed and so on. But it doesn't seem available, except to those present.

It would help others to be more aware of certain risks that specific routes present if climbers could have access to such details when an accident has occurred, perhaps in a forum or a page that is open to the public.

In reply to Chris_Donovan: This is the internet, couldn't you have made a loop GIF of the you're fine ... OOF bit, instead?

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

Is this Shining Cliff near Ambergate ?

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

To anyone with limited time, here is the bit you are looking for.

youtube.com/watch?v=PnvvVXvfP6s&t=410

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

I had a quick watch with the sound off (because I was at work). What's the route?

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

Good reaction by the belayer, that's a reliable mate, I'd say.

In reply to Rigid Raider:
Pure speculation as I wasn't the one belaying:

I was wondering if the quick taking in and stepping back by the belayer, at the time the rope comes tight, put excess force through the top bit of gear that popped. A soft catch wouldn't have seen him hit the ground.

In reply to deacondeacon:

Marathon Man?

In reply to Matt Amos:

No, a 'soft catch' would have resulted in likely serious injuries. The first 2 pieces that seem to come off do so because of the direction of the pull, so regardless of 'the catch' they would still zip. That top piece of gear would have come out anyway ayt that stage, as it was obviously not good anyway, and it was being shock loaded after the lower pieces took out rope stretch and then released.The belayer taking in and jumping back took out just enough of all that slack to slow down the climber before he decked. 1 more metre of rope out and he would have decked at full speed.

Well done to the belayer, he deserves a few beers. And that final catch of the climber at the end stopping him from wacking the head in a rock was pure class.

In reply to Mr Lopez:

Yes, the belayer did well. The runners that stayed in, and the rope, clearly saved him from more serious injury.

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

Hey everyone. Thanks for the feedback. The gear that failed was a small black diamond stopper (I can't remember the exact size). We figure the weight of the fall simply exceeded the force the stopper was manufactured to withstand. The wire burst when the stopper was loaded.

As for helmets: absolutely we should have both been wearing them.

I was belaying, so it's nice to hear some positive comments on that front. I must admit my immediate reaction was 'oh shit... did I do everything I could there?' And I'm still not 100% sure so it's great to hear others' perspective on it.

And yeah don't mind the banter... I made this video mostly for my brother (the faller) and myself as what will likely be our quintessential memento of the year we lived climbing in the UK together. I didn't expect to put it up online and bore you all with our half-baked commentary.

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

I am surprised that the wire burst, I would have expected the rock to fail first.
Hopefully someone with more experience will have some comments about the likely forces etc.

If ever I am faced as a belayer with that sort of fall, I would be proud to have reacted in the way the belayer did, excellent.

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

If you still have it, please post a photo of the bust stopper. Thanks.

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

My sister died recently.... and so I was much moved watching you catching your brother, frame by frame. Beautiful. The naturalness of your instantaneous transition from catching the fall to cradling your brother's head is so perfect that it could have been choreographed. Would that I had had such balletic grace to catch my sister when she fell from her particular cliff. Cherish each other while you still can.

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

I just posted a couple photos that show a close up of the placement and what the stopper looked like afterwards. I guess uploaded photos take a while to clear the website though...

Once they're up I'll post a link on this thread.

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

Don't get me wrong, I think the belayers reactions are great, both with the catch and the head catch after. It's just good you're both alright, that's an impressive fall.

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

Just seen the photos of the busted stopper, thats a significant failure and needs to be investigated further.

In reply to DerwentDiluted:
It looks small, although not tiny (the nut). The BMC had an investigation into a wire snapping on a very small nut when a guy fell off the Knight's Move at Burbage, perhaps a decade ago now, that at least led me to stop using micro wires with the thinnest gauge wire (not RPs and soldered micro gear though). I wonder if this was similar? But as I said, that nut doesn't look like a 0 or 00.

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

Wow, I didn't actually watch the entire video with the sound on so I didn't realise you were brothers. I used to climb, mountaineer and mountain bike with my own brother 7 years junior and we have the closest bond you can imagine even though he now lives in the USA and his loyalty is divided between his family and his wife. Luckily the worst accident we ever suffered was when he crashed at speed on the BW around Skiddaw and tumbled down the track doing himself quite a lot of damage. Respect Dude. Cherish your brother.

In reply to Chris_Donovan:


We all think that and it's entirely natural. But in reality, you just go in the zone and do your best - which you did. I've held some right horrors - I can think of one where in the last microsecond I managed to save my mate's life. (That'll be with me until my dying day - it was so close.)

That was a nasty fall - am so glad that things turned out OK.

Mick

In reply to DerwentDiluted:

I am assuming the wire on the nut was damaged in some way before the fall? If not I am very surprised that the fall generated enough force to break the wire.

In reply to Wicamoi:

Our deepest condolences and heartfelt sympathy to you and your family. Wishing you all comfort and strength.

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

Where is the picture of the broken stopper?

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

First of all, glad you are both ok and well done on the belaying and catch of the head! You definitely deserve a pint.

It would be useful to get some more details if possible.

What type/size nut is that? You said BD Stopper? If so, it looks like it could be a #4 (based on the colour) which is rated to 6kN according to BD.

And was it the top piece of protection (i.e. was it the first piece to be loaded - it looks like it in the video)? If so, it could be expected to take the highest load in the system, having to resist both the force of the leader falling, and the force of the belayer , so I can see how you could generate enough force to snap it (assuming it is rated to 6KN).

Your quick reaction (taking in and stepping back) probably further increased force on the top piece, but at the same time stopped the leader hitting the ground.

I guess the take away points here are

i) its possible to generate high forces from relatively 'standard' looking falls
ii) its easy to hit the ground from quite high up
iii) put plenty of gear in (would a second piece at the same level as the broken nut helped reduce length of fall?)

Thanks for sharing this up, always good to try and learn some lessons from stuff that went wrong!

In reply to Rigid Raider:

https://www.ukclimbing.com/photos/author.html?id=219135

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

Did the wire pull out of the swage? Or just break?

In reply to Toerag:

Looks like the wire actually snapped, and not even at a point of stress concentration like the swage or the nut. I notice in the video that there's a small explosion of rock dust as the wire breaks, which suggests to me that part of the rock was under stress during the process - possibly the wire abraded across the rock, pressed by the krab, at the point where there's fresh damage level with the frayed bit?

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

First-off (and most importantly) I'm glad everyone involved was able to walk away and make this video. Secondly, fine work by the belayer for both stopping the fall and then cradling the climber as they bounced. Good effort.

Thirdly (and the point of this post), it might be worth contacting BD to see if the want their nut back for analysis. There may be something BD could learn from a piece of failed gear that could help them (and other manufacturers) make gear better. Having a piece of damaged kit and a decent video of the events that damaged it can only be beneficial to product development and customer education (I'm not pointing any sort of finger of blame towards BD here by the way, as there are a number of factors that could have contributed to the wire snapping).

Mike.

In reply to Chris_Donovan: I have never seen a wire fail like that - that really is quite unusual, and not at all something I would ever expect to happen. I guess you ( or rather your brother) didn't place the wire thinking it was compromised in some way. From the video it looks like it should in theory have been a pretty harmless fall except for the gear failing

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

It would be interesting to see a pic of the karabiner, so as to see if it has scrape marks from being dragged across the rock, which is what I believe caused the wire to fray and fail. A microsope would probably also show scratches across the strands around the area of the break.

In reply to wbo:


It certainly is unusual, but I don't think anyone should be under the illusion that its impossible to generate enough force to snap a wire from such a fall.

https://www.thebmc.co.uk/ae-microwire-failure

While the above link talks specifically about microwire failure, it says at the end:

"Essentially he fell from 2 – 3m above his real top runner, the Wallnut 0. That meant a fall of 4 – 6m with approximately 8m of rope between him and his belayer, giving a fall-factor of 0.5 to 0.75. This is a significant fall-factor, and it’s not surprising that a force of over 2kN would be generated on the runner. In fact in tests carried out by the BMC Technical Committee, it was found that in typical fall situations it was not difficult to generate forces between 6kN and 7kN on runners."

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

Wouldn't say there was any real fault in the belaying there, maybe a little more slack in the system than needed but within what would be considered normal I'd say, particularly as he was in the process of topping out. Reaction time was almost instant when the foot popped and taking in that armful of slack probably made the difference between a few bruises and a full speed ground impact with broken bones etc.

Like others I'm surprised to see the wire fail like that, when you said small stopper I was expecting like an brass head RP type thing rated at like 1KN as I've seen those snap before. Where as that looks like a proper No. 2'ish wire with a decent thickness of cable on it, they should be rated about 7-8Kn at least. I can only guess it was either already damaged or it was some freak situation where the krab has mashed into the wire against the rock somehow and its cut it.

In reply to Lord_ash2000:

As I wrote above, watch the runner and you'll see rock dust bursting out as it snaps, which suggests violent contact with the rock.

In reply to Matt Amos:


Hard to say for certain but it's pretty unlikely and if he hadn't taken a foot or two in then there wouldn't be a banter video to make, yer man would probably be in hospital with skull fractures and life changing brain injuries.
jk

In reply to DerwentDiluted:


Ay. That's not right!
jk

In reply to Otis:


The BMC should be the first port of call, not the manufacturer. I don't think BD are evil corp willing to kill climbers for a few more dollars, BUT a company is not the best placed organisation to investigate a piece of their own equipment failing.

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

Well damn. I thought it would have been a micro stopper you had there, not a full weight one. Looking at the photo of the nut in the crack, and the video again, it looks like the rope runs round the flake and levers the wire at that point where is being pinched between the rock and the crab. You can see all the marks in the rock where it did so.

Still wouldn't expect it to break, but probably one of those 1 in a million 'perfect storm' moments where a maybe slightly damaged wire gets trapped at exactly the right point and gets pulled in exactly the right direction to cause the failure.

Extending the runners and/or using double ropes could maybe have helped the situation with the zipping gear and avoid the rope going round corners pulling on the pieces in awkward ways, but sometimes shit just happens

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

I guess the only thing that could have been done differently here would be to prevent that first bit of gear from zipping as that added extra slack to the system without which you could have kept off the floor.
Using a cam or nut that would take an outward pull in the first placement if possible or having the belayer standing more in line/closer in. Although it's instinctive to run back to hold a fall and you could get clobbered by the falling climber in this case. Overall there's not a lot you could do.
Than nut is really dodgy, you don't expect a wire to blow in a middle of it's length at relatively low loads. Was it rather old and battered? either way I'd send it to the BMC for them to have a look.

In reply to Mr Lopez:


I'd be surprised if dragging the wire over the rock would do much damage to the wire but I do wonder whether the rope and krab briefly pinched against the rock, essentially fixing the climber's rope to the top krab and isolating the rest of the rope from absorbing any energy, turning a modest low fall-factor fall into a nasty FF2 jolt which would overload a 6kN nut. If that were the case the rope would probably have a witness mark in the sheath from the moment the wire failed if it were tightly pinned against the rock.

You don't expect full sized gear like that to fail under what should have been a prety modest load even with the (not especially) hard catch, something odd happened.
jk

In reply to jkarran:

I don't mean just dragging, but being levered round the corner a bit like this http://i226.photobucket.com/albums/dd137/senorlopez13/IMG_20170217_133841_z...

http://i226.photobucket.com/albums/dd137/senorlopez13/IMG_20170217_133856_z...

If you deviate 'something' by 90 degrees you are putting a force at that point of roughly 1.5 the load, so doing some very rough back of the envelope calculations, you could have the fall 'producing' 2kn, that generates 4 kn on the wire, and at the point it gets kinked you get 4kn x1.5, which is already 6kn and close to it's breaking strength. Those 6kn could have easily been 8, 9 or more. The actual maths and numbers will differ, this is jusy an example.

Add the pinching and grinding, some previous damage, and you get some extra airtime on the house

In reply to Wicamoi:

Thanks for that Wicamoi. It means a lot. And my condolences to you and your family.

You're right: we should all pause every now and then and be consciously grateful of being able to spend time with each other. This fall had a bit of that affect on us for sure...

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

This is cool: I didn't anticipate getting this much interest in this.

I do have more detail on the incident. For instance, we did contact Black Diamond and showed them a video and a picture of the stopper. They weren't particularly insightful in their response (unsurprisingly they said buy a helmet!).

Maybe what I'll do if I get around to it is throw together a video that just shows just the fall and pictures of the placement/stopper (spare everyone the brotherly banter) and post it with a detailed description of what happened and the follow up response from BD...

Not sure when I'll do that but it looks like having captured this fall on video has potential to benefit us all through community discussion, so I certainly will at some point.

In reply to jkarran:

I doubt this was a modest load: I highly recommend reading this: https://www.thebmc.co.uk/ae-microwire-failure

And especially: "All this shows that in a significant fall (fall-factor 0.5 or above), where the belayer is making a serious effort to hold the fall, the force on the top runner is likely to be between 6 and 7kN. For a climber to feel confident that their runners will hold without breaking, they should have a minimum strength of 7kN. And even this does not guarantee security, since higher forces can be generated in some high friction situations. "

In this fall the belayer is jumping backwards at the time the rope comes tight which has probably increased the impact force on the top runner. My hypothesis would be that this combined with the single rope and low slippage belay device increased the force on the top runner beyond the breaking load of the wire.

I'm definitely not saying that the belayer did the wrong thing, but I'm not sure an extraordinary explanation is required either.

In reply to GPN:

Maybe it's dramatically foreshortened but it doesn't look to me like he's more than a couple of feet above the gear when he slips and it's a 6kN wire. Maybe they're big lads.
jk

In reply to jkarran:
Look on the slow-motion footage. He's only about 3m from the ground when the wire breaks. Let's say the crag is 10m high, meaning the climber falls 7m on to the top piece. The climber fell from the top of the crag meaning that there was probably about 11m of rope out. This makes a fall factor of about 0.6 (plus or minus a bit).

Then go back to this from the BMC:
"All this shows that in a significant fall (fall-factor 0.5 or above), where the belayer is making a serious effort to hold the fall, the force on the top runner is likely to be between 6 and 7kN. For a climber to feel confident that their runners will hold without breaking, they should have a minimum strength of 7kN. And even this does not guarantee security, since higher forces can be generated in some high friction situations. "

That 6kN wire doesn't look so bomber now...

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

Been there done that, got the t-shirt. Glad everyone is okay - my ankle is still pretty messed up a year on from a 70ft deck. Helmets are pretty helpful to in those situations, probably the reason I'm not dead!

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

Technical discussions aside, I loved your chat about whether it had been a good grass season., made me chuckle.

In reply to Bobling:

trying to identify the belay device - it's not a grigri is it ?

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

Seems to look like a gri gri - can't really tell - everyone knows that petzl say grigris shouldn't be used on trad climbs because they rip the gear out - so it can't be.

In reply to wbo:


I had a much smaller ground fall with no injuries a long time ago with very similar damage to the wire. In my case it was a no 3 RP. I was failing on a route somewhere on Malham L Wing, got back to what seemed a safe distance from the wire, slumped on to the rope and ended on the ground. I assumed the nut had pulled but it was still up there in place and had broken at the karabiner very much like in the present photos. Because it was a small nut I just accepted it and came to trust RPs only in big clusters.

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

From the way the belayer is handling the device it looks like a grigri. There have been many threads about belaying a trad leader with a grigri in the past on the forum with the usual consensus that is a bad idea because it can overload the gear and cause it to fail - exactly as seems to have happened in this vid. It would be interesting to know if a grigri was being used. Wonder what Petzl would say? The grigri 1 tech notes said no, but grigri 2 is a mystery.

In reply to Annabel Tall:

I can't understand how the design of the belayer's friction device would overload the gear. Are you saying that some devices would allow a certain amount of slippage and hence absorb some shock? I can see that overheating gear and causing other failures.

In reply to Rigid Raider:

I believe most conventional friction devices do this to a degree. However in this case any extra slippage would have resulted in a deck out (assuming the piece still failed).

In reply to DaveHK:


That's the most important point. We can hypothesise and speculate all we like about whether different belaying or a different device would have led to the wire not snapping, but the bottom line is that nobody was seriously hurt. With any other belaying or belay device there's a very real (but impossible to quantify) chance that the climber would have ended up on the ground with major injuries.

In reply to harold walmsley:


In the current case, the wire has not broken exactly at the krab end, though.

In reply to john arran:


For me, it is that I should really replace my older rocks/nuts/stoppers!

In reply to Chris_Donovan:



Do. We'd be interested.

But as TobyA said, the BMC would probably be a better body to investigate and comment on what exactly went wrong. Promoting safe practice and building knowledge in these things is more their remit - you've suggested BD weren't particularly interested, and to be fair, we could only expect the manufacturer's interest to extend as far as whether their equipment was actually at fault (which it probably wasn't - more an unfortunate combination of factors, as discussed above).

Oh, and as others have also said, top marks on your belay reactions - you can hold my rope anytime!

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

Very quick reactions from the belayer. Very impressed.

In reply to Jim Hamilton:


Seriously: why?

In reply to Rob Parsons:

My initial impression from the photo was that a nut shouldn't fail like that, but it looks like it's fairly old/well used and so possibly not as strong as a new one.

In reply to Graeme Hammond:

Yeah I agree, having done the route there were definitely missed very good placements in the upper cracks slightly left of the gear in the video.

In reply to Chris_Donovan:

Well done for everyone staying alive!
The snapped wire still surprises me.
You were standing away from the crag, hence I guess your brother catching the rope between his legs and rotating rather than landing feet first. The corollary being that you couldn't have supplied very much counter force, yet the wire still snapped. You are lifted no more than I am regularly at the climbing wall, not slammed at speed into the wall, which again wouldn't suggest to me a wire snapping fall, unless the wire was weak in some way. Finally, many of us on this site have taken bigger falls onto such gear without the gear failing, or feeling the force through the harness an body required to break such a nut. Maybe we have just all been taught a salutary lesson, so well done for that too.

Might any of the following even be a possibility:
the rope snagged on something, reducing the force on you (was there any damage to the rope?)
the wire being rusty
the wire not being a real BD stopper? (i.e. where did you buy it from?)

Finally, how hard was it to untie your brother's knot?

Thanks and all the best,
D

In reply to Jim Hamilton:


We would all obviously want to understand why the nut has failed in this case.

However, cable doesn't just 'go bad' - so an an old wire should be perfectly good (and shouldn't need to be retired or replaced) unless it's showing obvious damage: e.g. signs of rust/corrosion; signs of having been repeatedly bent; broken strands; etc.

I hope some more analysis of the failure in this case might shed more light.

In reply to Rob Parsons:

Well that is what the pictures looked like to me. Nut still in situ, two long tails of wire with a break right at the bottom where the crab linking the wire to the quickdraw would have been passing through the bottom of the wire loop. Can you explain how you interpret it differently?

In reply to Rob Parsons:


I wouldn't be surprised if that's the usual position for an overload failure, between the crimp and the bend, both of which will act to alter the stress distribution in the various strands. The cable strands the other side of the bend have much more length free between the bend and the nut to move and stretch allowing the stress to distribute evenly across the different wires.

It'd be interesting to hear from anyone that has snapped a few of these to see if that half arsed explanation is anything like right.
jk

In reply to jkarran:

I also wondered from the in-situ shot whether the swage might have wedged in the crack leaving most of the force to be taken on this side of the loop if there was a lot of friction at the crab