Safety Concern at Waterloo Regional
 

During the elimination matches at Waterloo yesterday, one of the minibot towers malfunctioned. Between matches, a volunteer got up on a step ladder to replace the sensors in the tower. The ladder supplied by FIRST was too short and he was forced to stand on the top of this ladder to be able to reach the top of the pole.

I am not trying to attack this volunteer, he was trying to get the tower fixed so that matches could continue and was working with the tools he had. However, with this years field involving these tall towers, I think FIRST should be supplying a taller ladder. They supply spare sensors, so they must expect these to be changed with the ladders they provide. With such a focus on safety, things like this should not happen.

Re: Safety Concern at Waterloo Regional
 

Are you sure that FIRST supplied the ladder? I've never seen one in the trucks. The one that I used at Waterford was venue-supplied.

Re: Safety Concern at Waterloo Regional
 

I agree that ladder was definitely too short, but I don't think FIRST supplied it.

Re: Safety Concern at Waterloo Regional
 

I was fairly certain the ladder said FIRST on it. Can someone confirm this either way?

Re: Safety Concern at Waterloo Regional
 

Kara, the FIRST-built fields come with at least one ladder and a wheelchair ramp. I don't know if the FiM-built fields do; if not, it wouldn't hurt to build the ramp just in case. (I only know of a couple of cases where it's actually been used. Shouldn't be too hard to build just one and have the teams say "We would like to use it" a week or two before to make sure it gets into the trailer going to that event.) I've been up those ladders a time or two.

I wonder if FIRST was expecting people to do tower maintenance at a time when they'd have time to pull the tower down...

Re: Safety Concern at Waterloo Regional
 

The way it was explained in the field manual was that you were supposed to unscrew the tower and bend it over to "normal" height to switch the lights on and off. There should have been enough slack in the signal cord to allow this. But if I had been faced with the same problem, I probably would have reached for the ladder too, messing with taking the pole down just takes too long.
FIRST does supply a ladder on the trucks, but it is not a very big one.

Re: Safety Concern at Waterloo Regional
 

This ladder was definitely supplied by FIRST. As seen here

Re: Safety Concern at Waterloo Regional
 

And the liability and workers comp rates just went up based on the proof provided!:eek:

Re: Safety Concern at Waterloo Regional
 

Why was a referee doing field repairs?

Re: Safety Concern at Waterloo Regional
 

Unscrewing the pole takes a significant amount of time. I too can understand why someone went straight for the ladder.

-Brando

Re: Safety Concern at Waterloo Regional
 

Later on, dealing with the same problem (I believe 1 match later, IIRC), someone (I think this same volunteer) went up the ladder again, and the arm was not fully locked in position. THREE other volunteers came running and had him down and had the safety risk fixed in seconds before sending him up again.

FIRSTs focus on safety IS getting through to people. Sometimes circumstances still cause us to forget details. My guess is that in the heat of the moment, this volunteer simply hadnt noticed that the arm had failed to lock in. Luckily, others noticed, and did their part to remove the risks.

Re: Safety Concern at Waterloo Regional
 

Pull the Tower down, takes about 5 minutes to undo the base cover, detach the wires, lower the tower, remove and replace the top and put it all back together. Barely enough time for a chicken dance and much safer than a ladder.

Minbot retrival is a concern, a student using the practice filed tower at Niles got cut up catching the bot, please use gloves. There are lots of sharp edges on many of them and blodsatins are hard to remove from the carpet.

Re: Safety Concern at Waterloo Regional
 

He volunteered to have a look at the light since he's familiar with that particular kind from his work.