On 11 Oct 2011 the VTIO held it’s AGM. Outgoing president Pat Kenyon accepted the thanks of the committee for several years of hard work on behalf of the organisation.
The new committee and office bearers are as follows:
President: Kiah Martin
Vice-president: Joe Harris
Treasurer: Pete Reynolds
Secretary: Dean Simonsen
Website Manager: Juri Meggarity
Media Officer: Shane Hall
VTCC coordinator: Pat Kenyon
Promotions and prizes: Grant Cody
General committee members: Graeme Hughes, Troy Porter, Andrew McKennan, Michael North, Matt Weatherhead, Mark Cashmore, Alex Pinniger
Grant Harris of Canopy Access Ltd. has kindly put together a document giving guidelines as to some common mistakes made with Single Rope Technique, and showing how to avoid those risks. Grant’s company is involved in canopy access work for scientists and film-makers all over the world, so he has logged a lot of vertical kilometres on SRT and he really knows his stuff. In addition, Grant’s document also demonstrates several techniques for conducting an aerial rescue when the casualty is suspended on SRT gear.
You can download a copy of the SRT safety notes PDF here.
Climbers who are not familiar with Single Rope Technique may like to check out the SRT PDF that is available in the Downloads section.
The VTIO is pleased to be able to make available a new document in our downloads section. The draft PPE and climbing gear inspection record is an excel spreadsheet for climbers to document monthly and bi-annual climbing gear inspections.
The spreadsheet is designed to make it simple and quick to record the results of regular documented climbing equipment inspections, which should be in addition to the daily inspection carried out by all climbers prior to using equipment. For more information on recommended equipment inspection schedules, please consult the VTIO Draft Climbing Guidelines. The spreadsheet can be completed electronically, or printed out and filled in by hand.
We hope that a more standardised equipment inspection record sheet will aid the practice of regular gear inspection across the industry, as well as making it easier for sub-contractors or visiting climbers to validate the inspection history of their equipment. Climbers in the VTCC will be expected to produce this or a similar document for the competition gear inspection, documenting the date of issue of their climbing equipment as well as an inspection history.
Please note however that the document is currently in a draft format, and we welcome criticism and input from the climbing community. Questions or comments please contact Kiah Martin(kiah@thetreeworks.com.au).
Habitat Hollow Creation in Trees
Please use the link above to check out the latest PDF available from our Downloads section. The document provides guidelines for the different sizes of hollow and entrance for a range of Victorian birds and animals, as well as detailed instructions on how to go about creating such habitat hollows in both stems and branches.
Good luck to Kiah Martin and Grant Cody, who are representing Australia in today’s International Tree Climbing Competition. Word from the States is that the preliminaries on Saturday were rained off, forcing the whole competition into a one-day format on the Sunday. Results will be posted here as soon as they are available.
In better news, the first revisions of the popular handouts from the recent workshop are now up online.
The PDF on Single Rope Technique now features the RAD system (pictured to the right).
Introduction to Redirects has been updated to include Tom Oldmeadow’s In-Line Retrievable Redirect (see below.)
Perhaps the biggest revision has been to Working the Angles, which has been updated with a new appendix showing graphs of the various relationships described in the text: much easier to work with on a job site than a complicated equation!
The VTIO would also like to announce that the next workshop in this series will be on Visual Tree Assessment. Date and details are still to be finalised, but keep watching this space!