Firefighters in Passaic, New Jersey, found out the hard way that ladders don’t always work the way they should.  The crew had been called to a fire in a paper recycling plant, on 12^th January, which had gotten very quickly out of hand.  Investigators determined that the plant staff had attempted to extinguish the blaze before calling the fire department, and the twenty foot high pile of bundled paper was certainly not helping to get the situation under control.  The fire department battled for two and a half hours before the fire was deemed to be under control, but it was still burning.  During the course of this action the top section of the vehicle-mounted extending ladder, that has a bucket at the top for crew to stand in, buckled and left the bucket sitting on top of the roof.  It is unclear at this stage what caused both the fire, and the ladder malfunction.  Despite the appearance of the twisted section, firefighter’s ladders are designed with prolonged exposure to high heat in mind, so it is most likely that it was down to mechanical failure of some kind, or damage sustained at other jobs.  No one was hurt in this case, but it goes to show that even ladders built for emergency services to withstand rugged conditions can fail from time to time.

A Ukrainian artist hanging paintings at an exhibition, in Brussels, also discovered how painful it can be when ladders don’t perform the way they should.  Zoia Skoropadenko was hanging her large canvasses, all painted on the theme of octopi and torsos, at the exhibition space in Belgium when the ladder she was using slipped out from underneath her as she reached down for a canvas.  The ladder appears to be a step ladder with a wide base, tapering slightly towards the top. Usually this style of ladder is very stable, given the wider base, but that didn’t help Zoia.  Perhaps she had opted to use the ladder leant against the wall, in order to be close enough to the surface to hang the painting, but that turned out to have been a bad decision.  Fortunately she was not hurt, despite the dramatic looking fall, as one of her canvasses broke her landing and she was able to continue on with her preparations for the exhibition.  Maybe if she had been using the step ladder correctly it would not have happened, so there is an important lesson there for anyone thinking of taking a shortcut with their access equipment.

Our last cautionary tale of what can happen when ladders go wrong rests the blame firmly with the operators.  Two men were attempting to take down a chandelier in a stairwell using just a step ladder.  Anyone could tell that they had the wrong ladder for the job, but rather than getting the right equipment they improvised, with one side of the step ladder resting on the stairs, and the other held up by one man while the other climbed it.  There was, no doubt, a conversation about trust, strength and safety, but they went ahead with the plan anyway.  The man removing the light fitting was leaning a little too far for comfort when he unscrewed it, but he then dropped it.  As the light fell it hit the hand of the man holding up the ladder which caused him to let go.  The ladder fell, closed and twisted round, throwing the other man to the ground, slamming into the banister as he went.  In a video of the incident they both appeared to be laughing at the calamity.  A pity it came too late to qualify for the 2016 Ladder Losers competition, but it certainly sets the bar high (or low depending on which way you look at it) for this year’s event.