Whenever I think about roof rescues, the words “simple,” “efficient” and “rapid” hardly ever come to mind. In general, there are too many variables on most roofs for an elevated rescue operation to ever be considered “easy.” You can imagine how my interest was piqued when I ran across a recent online news article of a roof rescue performed in less than a half hour by the Hamden, Conn. Fire Department (HFD). While cleaning the single- ply EPDM synthetic rubber membrane of a barrell roof with his partner, a 57-year-old employee of the CSC Hood and Duct Services, of Windsor, Conn., slipped on his lifeline and fell off the 135,000 square-foot roof of the TD Bank Sports Center at Quinnipiac University’s York Hill Campus. It was a calm, partly sunny summer day with temperatures in the low eighties. After incurring an arrested fall in a personal fall arrest system (PFAS), the worker hung suspended from his lifeline about a body-length below the eave of the roof — about 35 feet above a trap-stone embankment.
Due to remote component positioning, he was obviously incapable of self-rescue by either ascent or descent. In previous articles, I’ve spoken about the late Harvey Grant, who’s often lauded, (along with James Gargan and Robert Murray, Jr.) as the “father” of modern emergency rescue techniques well ahead of his time. For the purpose of emergency response training and rescue evaluation, Grant broke down emergency response events into twelve sequential and timed phases, divided into three groups of four procedural steps each.