mental! yeah, I want to go walking along a crumbling 90 year old spanish concrete walkway! wtf??
oh, and looks like they pulled the tower video from youtube. Not sure I understand the reasoning, given the voiceover guy said that it's normal for these engineers to free climb. Maybe it's analagous to couriers normally riding brakeless? Just because they can and do doesn't make it legal, nor something you should really publicise... (something like that anyway).
First off I want to thank everyone for the great response I got on the video “Stairway to Heaven”, it was really much more than I could have hoped for. Now, having said that I am also very sorry that I could not keep the video up for you to share with your friends and family. I truly am sorry, I can see from the comments how popular it was and that’s why I want to explain what happened.
The footage of the climb came from a friend of mine that does this type of work, I have know him for several years and he has helped me many times in the past. Recently he gave me this video he shot on one of his jobs. I showed him the edited video and he approved it and I put it up on TheOnLineEngineer.Org and You Tube over the weekend. On Monday he was getting calls from colleagues telling him that they were concerned about what the video showed. His world is a very small one, and you don’t want to bite the hand that feeds you! Some facility owners are pretty uptight about liability and such and may not hire him if they think he does not take safety seriously.
So he asked me to take it down, and I did. That was Monday morning (Sep 13, 2010). Today (Sep 15) he told me it was up on You Tube, by the time I looked at it it had over 77,000 views. It was on more than a dozen websites. The chance that someone important would see it was increasing rapidly. So the video most of you saw was one that had been ripped off from my website before I took it down. I wrote asking the guy who put it up to take it down but got no response so I contacted You Tube.
Once again I am sorry about pulling the video, I know that every time I looked at it my legs got weak, there’s no way I could do that type of work. AND THATS MY POINT – I need this guy who made the video, we plan to do more of them, but it won’t happen if he can’t get work because he’s been black listed by the industry. He’s also my friend and I don’t want to see him get hurt because of some video I put up on the internet.
We have had two offers to broadcast this video, a request to submit it to a film festival in France, over 118,000 views on You Tube. This was all much more than we had ever planned for or thought would happen.
AS SOON AS WE CAN WE WILL HAVE MORE VIDEOS ABOUT TOWER CLIMBING, in the mean time please be patient.
And once again thank you for all the comments.
Russ
mental! yeah, I want to go walking along a crumbling 90 year old spanish concrete walkway! wtf??
oh, and looks like they pulled the tower video from youtube. Not sure I understand the reasoning, given the voiceover guy said that it's normal for these engineers to free climb. Maybe it's analagous to couriers normally riding brakeless? Just because they can and do doesn't make it legal, nor something you should really publicise... (something like that anyway).
From http://www.theonlineengineer.org/TheOLEBLOG/