She was a wall employee who was climbing when no students were there climbing. The autobelay was retracting normally on the way up, but when she jumped off at the top to lower down, it lowered without resistance. She fell from the top ( ~30 feet ) and was badly injured. A passing police officer heard her yelling for help from outside, and came in to help.

Thats Terrible. Those things have always scared me.

Yeah. No freakin' way you'll catch me on one of those autobelay machines. They scare the hell out of me. I'm surprised gyms even use them.

Hope the girl recovers well and quickly.

While I don't wish to speak ill of the injured, I feel that accidents need to be discussed in order to prevent them in the future. Everyone I've tried to talk to doesn't have much idea of what exactly happened. She was there alone, and fell. We only have her explanation, which is likely not particularly clear considering the accident.

Without going into details (google the patent if you want them), the device has three independent braking mechanisms that engage based on the centripedal force from the webbing feeding out. As long as its taking rope in as you climb, failure of the device should only cause it to break harder. Unless there is an impending (and incredibly late recall at this point), any properly maintained and operated trublue should be perfectly safe. The important question is what errors were made that caused the accident so that we can all learn from them.





To y'all who have a natural fear of newfangled devices such as the trublue, I'll refer you to an interview I saw on The Colbert Report the other day where we learn how science and reality are determined by personal feelings. (http://www.hulu.com/watch/353531/the-colbert-report-don-mcleroy)

B

The trublue seems pretty similar to the other autobelays which were recalled and discountinued a couple of years ago after similar accidents. Based on the intro video on trublue's site it looks really sketchy so I'm not at all surprised if it turns out it really did fail catastrophically.

The gym I frequent has some kind of hydraulic autobelays which feel very solid (in fact almost too solid since they pull on you contantly, not with a delay like the trublu).

... it simply didn't seem right. I'd prefer a human on the line rather than some mechanical device that may or may not be maintained properly....

Is there anymore information on what happened here. If the auto belay failed for any reason I have to imagine that it will affect the use of auto belays in gyms.

I thought they redesigned these so that they would always arrest the fall even if the primary mechanisms failed?

A human has many more possible modes of failure (distraction, fatigue, hangover, etc.) than a machine, yet we feel safer trusting a human than a machine.

We place great trust in machines to transport us to a climb (did you really think about the brakes in your car when you were driving, or did you not even think about them and just blindly trust that they would work?), yet we have trouble trusting a much simpler machine to belay us once we're there.

I'm the same, I prefer a human, but I know I'm not safe either way.

it's a straw man argument....

... I can be sure my human partner is working based on a simple conversation and smelling his breath.

No, it was not a straw man tactic. For that to be true I would have had to make a misrepresentation, and use that distortion to promote my view.

All I did was point out a bit of irony in the fact that (in general) we will blindly trust very complicated machines to transport us to a climb, yet not trust a simple machine for a belay once we are there.


I know what you mean, but in reality you cannot be sure your belayer will catch you. Even a sober and experienced belayer is still very fallible, all it takes is something as simple as fatigue or distraction to lead to complete failure. It's a risk we accept, and one we try to minimize, yet the risk is always there.