Emergency services are awaiting the arrival of a cherry picker to recover a man stuck 270ft up a chimney.
Police were first called at 2.22am to reports of a man trapped on the top of Dixon’s Chimney in Carlisle, Cumbria. His condition is not known but he has now been trapped upside down at the top of the structure for around 11 hours
>>20513 Definitely more hassle to get up there and get him down while be was still conscious than to wait 12 hours and then have to order a cherry picker because he's passed out.
>>20517 Right him, then get him to climb down after you. Shouldn't be a problem as long as you don't just leave him up there for 12 hours so he can pass out and die of an aneurysm instead.
>>20521 Seems like not a bad way to do it. We don't know it happened this way, but if he just passed out from being stuck upside down, the worst pain he would likely have suffered would have been a nasty headache. Contrast that with hitting the ground at speed, which would have left him in immense pain for a few moments post-impact before dying shortly thereafter.
>If he was trying to top himself, he would have just jumped at some point, no?
Even if you really do want to die, making yourself actually jump is not that easy. The ancient pre-human parts of your brain will fight tooth and nail to keep you intact.
>>20526 Some bloke up the ladder saying "haha mate, you've got yourself in a right pickle" with a emergency cup of tea and a crafty harness cobbled together from shoe laces
You're right mate, probably by the time they'd worked out wot gender the patient identified as and the best way to carry him without it being harassment, he was long dead.
Or it's harder then you think to safely rescue an upside down bloke from a 300ft chimney.
>>20530 I'm sure it is harder than it looks but back'nt the good old days, you had Blue Peters presenters climbing up rickety wooden ladders without any safety equipment to brush bird shit off Nelson's Column
Christ that is bloody terrifying. And I've solo'd mountains.
The complete lack of safety equipment is what drives me mad. Fuck knows how they even secured that overhanging ladder in the first place, I'm sure I don't want to know. People must have been made of different stuff back then.
Well I've wasted all morning watching Fred Dibnah videos now, cheers for that.
There's one where he's talking about drinking before starting a climb. Never went up a chimney without a couple of pints down him apparently. Just an incomprehensibly different time back then, and it's hard not to feel like something has been lost in the transition.
>There's one where he's talking about drinking before starting a climb. Never went up a chimney without a couple of pints down him apparently. Just an incomprehensibly different time back then, and it's hard not to feel like something has been lost in the transition.
Maybe it's just the jobs I've had and the people I've met, but I hear this a lot and never really thought it myself. Granted, there aren't many (any?) steeplejacks laddering chimneys like Fred did, and the majority of working class folk who might have been doing dangerous or semi-dangerous work are now sequestered in offices answering phones and the like, but the 'let's just get on with it' attitude of Mr. Dibnah and jobs that require confidence and tolerance of risk are still very much there. There was a lad in a thread recently who seemed surprised that a policeman was doing a 12 hour shift, and perhaps that would be outright daunting to some people, but for plenty of others it's not even worth a second thought.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about humans is how quickly we can get used to something, and how well we can endure it. I was shit scared of heights as a young 'un, but being surrounded as I was by blokes cut from the same sort of cloth as Fred I was encouraged to get up the top of them ladders anyway. I still remember how I felt the first time I did it, but I also remember how quickly I realised that the ladder wasn't wobbling, I was.
I've lost my track a bit here but I don't think the world has really changed, and certainly not for the worse. People lived these rough hewn working lives not because they were purer souls or knew the value of honest work, but because they needed to eat and couldn't achieve that at that time in an air conditioned cubicle. While it's impressive and really telling that you probably don't need a three point harness system and an expert safety assessment to climb a chimney successfully, I'm not convinced the presence of these things is bad or undesirable. There's also certainly a great deal of people that do their work with a couple of pints in them, not least the ones that are supposed to be conscious of the safety of themselves or others, it's just that it's not really tolerated or encouraged as it once was. Again, probably not a bad thing.
>>20540 I think you're right. It's amazing the amount of difference that can be made through the mentality of either believing you can learn to do something or simply have to get on with it in order to function rather than filling yourself with doubt.
I knew this sort of response was coming to the point I almost put an "in b4" in spoilers. I don't disagree by the way- I'm certainly not suggesting that health and safety has somehow eroded the pride and grit of hard working northern men or anything like that.
I just mean that frankly, it takes some absolutely brazen bollocks to climb a 300 foot chimney, without a harness, half cut- But as Fred himself said in the video, he prefers it to being tied to a machine in a factory or rotting away in am office cubicle. I've felt much the same throughout my life, and I've endured a lot of soul draining call centre jobs in my time, but we've largely moved on, as a society, past having a place for folk like that. Those jobs might still exist, but in a fraction of the numbers they ever used to.
It's hard for me not to romanticise a simpler time where you could do honest hands on work like that and have a few pints while you were at it and nobody would think less of you for it; whereas these days you can get the sack for saying the wrong thing on Facebook.
>>20541 >Mua'Dweeb's first training was in how learn
People aren't really taught how to learn. Most schools except the ones them elites go to did away with the traditional trivium/quadrivium which emphasised how to think and learn and adopted the Prussian educational model which placed far more emphasis on educating people just enough so that they could be useful to the state.
>>20540 >There was a lad in a thread recently who seemed surprised that a policeman was doing a 12 hour shift
No there wasn't, as was pointed out to you at the time.
