A window cleaner plunged four metres onto a pavement after suffering an electric shock in Johannesburg on Thursday afternoon, said Netcare 911.
Spokesperson Jeff Wicks said he was critically injured and was taken to Milpark Hospital.
The incident occurred at the intersection of Small and Bree streets in Johannesburg.
Wicks said the man was thought to have been thrown from his cleaning platform after making contact with an electrical transformer.
"He was strapped to a window frame just a few feet under the huge clock. The cold of a November morning swept away from the gilded dome of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank above him. He shifted his weight. The wind snapped at the chamois strung around his neck. Below, toy-like cars and tiny figures wove a crazy pattern in front of the Long Island Rail Road station."
This vivid, poetic storyline from the November 16, 1952 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle describes not the antics of some real-life Spiderman, but rather the daily grind of one humble 34-year-old New Yorker, Ed Kemp.
Kemp was an employee of the Standard House and Window Cleaning Company, on 126 Broadway in Brooklyn; a window-washer with seven years experience under his belt. His particular task at the Williamsburg Savings Bank was a cruelly sisyphean one -- on the first of every month, he started cleaning the topmost window on the 43-story building, and slowly wound his way downward, washing window after window after window by hand so that, weather permitting, he would have cleaned all 1,100 windows by the end of the month. His reward for completing this herculean task? Starting over again at the top of the building for another long, spiralling descent.
Grease pencil marks the spot, as Kemp dangles hundreds of feet above downtown Brooklyn.
In its half-page story, the Eagle paints a surprisingly thoughtful portrait of Kemp and his solitary life in the sky. Gone is the newspaper's usual brisk and boisterous tone, replaced in this piece with sometimes wistful, sometimes reverent prose.
Describing Kemp, the Eagle reporter Vic Timoner, writes, "he only spoke when he was sure of what he was saying...he only moved when he was sure of where he was moving."
Kemp emerges as a quietly heroic figure, a "husky six-footer" who without complaint braved dizzying heights in service to the strangers he saw only through a glass, darkly. Gazing in on men and women working, talking, laughing, living, he remained always separated from them by those hundreds of window panes, suspended in his own quiet, windy limbo.
While Timoner portrays the work of a window cleaner as a grimly noble struggle against ambient dirt and pigeon dung, the job was also an inherently dangerous one. As the pictures show, Kemp was held up only by a harness belt that clamped onto a window frame with no scaffolding or platform to support him. Earlier Eagle articles show that even these meager safety measures were hard-won.
A brief article from November 3, 1929 describes a protest march to City Hall, attended by five hundred unionized window cleaners. In addition to demanding a ten percent pay increase, they wanted the city to take action against building owners who had yet to install safety hooks on building exteriors. They had lost 84 members of their ranks to fatal falls since 1928.
Another article, from 1937, describes the harrowing experience of one cleaner, James Osman, whose safety belt broke while he was washing panes on a building in Manhattan. He dangled sixteen stories in the air, above a crowd of 2,500 gawkers, until a plucky telephone operator found a seven-foot pole to offer out the window to Osman. He was pulled to safety, and a generous superintendent gave him the rest of the day off.
Not so lucky was George Urban, who fell seventeen floors in January of 1944. His lifeless body was found on a protruding extension of an office building on Tuesday the 18th, two days after his wife reported to police that he hadn't come home from his window washing job. That same year, state legislators enacted a new, stricter safety code to protect workers. This required old, rusted anchor bolts on the exterior of buildings to be replaced with non-corrosive ones, so that cleaners could trust the supports to which they strapped their safety belts. Building owners had difficulty complying with the code, however, because of wartime shortages in materials. A New York Times article from November 18, 1945 reported that skyscraper windows had gone unwashed since July of that year as window washers awaited the installment of safer anchors and hooks. A dirty pall fell over the high-rises of New York City.
Even after buildings were brought up to code, the life of a window washer was full of hazards -- not the least of which was human error. In March of 1946, one Brooklyn cleaner fell four stories to his death after forgetting to fasten his safety belt.
What of our man in the sky, Ed Kemp? Did he harbor a fear of falling? Ever stoic, he replied, "I wouldn't be up here if I was afraid." It seems for him the greater danger was loneliness. Kemp said of his job, "It's a good life. Lonely. But you see people, even if you don't speak to them. They're sociable enough but they kind of look at you like they feel sorry for you."
A California window washer has been electrocuted.
Huntington Beach fire Capt. Jeff Lopez says the man was washing windows at a three-story medical building at about 6:34 a.m. Tuesday when an extension rod he was holding came into contact with a 12,000 volt power line.
Fox News television in Los Angeles says a portion of the building was briefly evacuated.
The window washer's name hasn't been released.
TWO window cleaners were left high and dry on the job . . . after binmen carted off their gear.
Stephen Fawkes and George Millar were in a lather after discovering their bag of expensive cloths had been tipped into the back of a lorry by refuse collection workers.
The pair, who were cleaning windows at a home in John Lang Street, in Johnstone, discovered their scrim cloths had disappeared when they returned to their bucket for fresh water.
And after chasing down a refuse lorry, they claim they were told their cleaning materials had been piled in with the rubbish.
Stephen, 22, said: “I was up the ladder at the front of the house and George was round the back and when I went back to the bucket I noticed our bag of cloths was gone.
“It was then that I spotted the bin lorry up the street and I ran after it and asked the guys if they had lifted a plastic bag from the street.
“It turns out one of the boys had thrown it in the back of the truck, along with the waste from the wheelie bins, thinking it was rubbish that had been left out.
“Needless to say, there was no way we could get the bag back so that was us for the day.
“We couldn’t do any more windows and as we’d only just started the shift we were pretty raging about it.”
Nineteen-year-old George’s dad, Charlie Millar, runs the C&J Cleaning Services business.
He contacted Renfrewshire Council’s environmental department to report the blunder in a bid for compensation for the dumped cloths.
But he had his bubble burst when council chiefs refused to take responsibility for the missing cloths.
Charlie said: “Inside the bag were about 20 scrim cloths worth £5 a time and a few standard cloths so there was at least £100 worth of materials chucked in the back of a bin lorry.
“I don’t understand why anyone would think it was rubbish when they were sitting beside a bucket of water and a spare squeegie.
“However, the council said their guys wouldn’t have touched it because they’re not trained to lift bags. There’s no chance of being refunded. We’ve been left to pick up the tab.”
A Renfrewshire Council spokesperson said: “One of our employees lifted a bag that had been left beside a bin and threw it into the refuse vehicle. The window cleaner approached the employee but told him not to worry as the bag only contained rags. If this wasn’t the case the council has a well-established procedure that people can use to make a claim to our insurance company.”
Invisible TreeHouse? Really?
They said it couldn't be done. When we first wrote about the almost invisible treehouse to be built in Sweden by Tham & Videgard, 899 commenters thought it was AutoCad eye candy, impossible to build and death for birds. But they built it, one of six units in a "Treehotel" opening this weekend 40 miles south of the Arctic Circle in Sweden.
The four meter glass cube looks as spectacular in reality as it did in the rendering. Kent Lindvall, co-owner of the TreeHotel, says:
Everything will reflect in this - the trees, the birds, the clouds, the sun, everything. So it should be invisible nearly in the forest.'
And what about the birds? According to Designboom, Lindvall says that a special film that is visible to birds will be applied to the glass.
The units are constructed from sustainably harvested wood and have electric radiant floor heating and "a state-of-the-art eco-friendly incineration toilet"
(I have owned an incinerating toilet and they are anything but eco-friendly, using a huge amount of electricity, creating noise and a pall of burned poop smell when the wind isn't blowing. Perhaps they have improved)
But other than that minor quibble, it appears to be a truly eco resort. The owners say in Designboom:
This is untouched forest and we want to maintain it the same way. we decided for example to not offer snowmobile safari which is very common up here,' says Selberg. Instead, wilderness walks will be offered.
Photos from Arnold Glas
There's a terrible feeling you get when a bird smacks into a window, at the office or at your home. "What was that?!" You look outside, and see a dead or injured bird on the ground. Birds can't see glass, and windows on buildings are a major cause of avian fatalities around the world. But it doesn't have to be that way. There's such a thing as bird friendly glass, believe it or not. A German company called Arnold Glas makes Ornilux, and recently collected an international design award for its spider-web inspired product.
Estimates are that more than 100 million birds die every year in the United States from collisions with windows. The number is about 250,000 a day in Europe, according to Arnold Glas. A special ultraviolet reflective coating makes the Ornilux glass visible to birds, but doesn't obstruct the view for us humans.
The latest version of the glass, called Ornilux Mikado, received the "red dot" award this year from the Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen in Essen, Germany. Judges noted that the glass uses the same techniques that spiders use to keep birds from flying through and destroying their webs.
"The highly effective coating which, when looked at against a backlight, seems like a randomly unfolding layer of the game Mikado pick-up sticks, is barely visible to humans and integrates seamlessly into architecture ..."
Credit: Orin Zebest
The glass was developed in conjuction with the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, which tested Ornilux on Central European garden birds and found they recognize it better than ordinary glass. The coating reduces bird strikes by an estimated 75 percent, is more effective than stickers and also helps insulate a building, Arnold Glas says.
The glass is making its way to the states. The Detroit Audubon Society is one of the latest organizations to highlight the product.
The first installation of Ornilux was in the spring of 2006, during the modernization of the 100-year-old enclosed swimming pool in the German city of Plauen. Courtesy Arnold Glas
The south side of the 56th floor of the Willis Tower is being fitted with solar windows (Image: Harshil.Shah via flickr)
Chicago's Willis Tower, formerly known as Sears Tower, was the world's tallest building from 1974 to 1998 and remains the tallest building in the U.S. to this day. Its 1451-foot (442 m) height adds up to enough window area to keep a window washer busy for life, or space for enough solar panels to be comparable to a 10 acre solar power plant. As part of a pilot project, the south facing windows of the 56th floor of the Willis Tower will be replaced with Pythagoras Solar's transparent solar windows which cut down on heat gain – and therefore cooling costs – as well as harnessing energy from the sun.
While the image that comes to mind when one thinks of solar power plants is probably one of rows upon rows of panels covering large areas of desert, replacing the windows of skyscrapers with solar windows gives cities with limited free space the opportunity to create vertical solar power plants. Pythagorus Solar's solar windows, which the company calls photovoltaic glass units (PGUs), are rectangular box-shaped units that allow diffused light to pass through, but use a prism to reflect sunlight down onto a horizontal PV cell along the bottom of the unit to generate the same amount of energy as standard rooftop-mounted solar cells.
"We are excited to launch this pilot with Pythagoras Solar's leading-edge solar window solutions as a test for not only the energy savings that can be achieved, but the potential they represent to actually generate power through the sun," said John Huston, Executive Vice President of American Landmark Properties, one of the ownership partners of Willis Tower.
If the pilot project proves successful, Pythagoras Solar's PGU's could be expanded beyond the 56th floor to cover enough surface area to provide over two megawatts of solar power.
Source:http://www.gizmag.com/willis-tower-solar-windows/18192/
A Washington Township man charged in a theft spree across three towns, including Haddonfield, is a suspect in two more heists here.
A woman who believes she may have been a victim of Mark Tonelli, of the Magic Window Washing Co., filed a complaint this month after reading a report about him on Haddonfield Patch, police said.
The woman, a resident in the 600 block of Edge Park Drive, said $2,100 in jewelry was missing from her home after Tonelli washed windows there on Nov. 19. She filed a police report on March 7. The woman said the day after Tonelli was at her home, she noticed a pair of diamond earrings, a pendant and a gold chain were missing. She said she didn’t immediately report Tonelli because she didn’t want to falsely accuse him. She said she left Tonelli alone for a short time in her home that day.
The next day, on March 8, a resident in the 200 block of Summit Avenue reported a pair of gold earrings, with pearl and ruby inset, a pearl bracelet and an emerald and gold necklace and a ruby and gold necklace were missing from her home after Tonelli cleaned her windows on Oct. 19. The report did not say why she decided to come forward now.
Tonelli, 48, of 109 Fomalhaut Ave. in the Sewell section of Washington Township, was arrested and charged last month with the theft of nearly $4,500 in jewelry from a Haddonfield residence in the unit block of Wedgewood Lane in November. He was linked to the stolen goods from a pawn shop receipt that included his driver’s license and photo ID.
Tonelli was listed in police reports as the owner of Magic Window Cleaning Co. The charges allege he stole jewelry from the Wedgewood Lane home on Nov. 25 while working there. The resident reported a gold bracelet, a diamond tennis bracelet and a diamond, heart-shaped pendant on a gold chain missing after Tonelli and two assistants cleaned the windows at her home.
Borough police said Tonelli’s arrest was the result of a joint investigation between Haddonfield, Harrison and Medford. He was charged with similar burglaries in all three towns. Tonelli was remanded to Haddonfield municipal court, where a $7,500 full, cash bail was set and then sent to Camden County jail. It was not immediately reported if he was still there or when new charges might be filed.
| A Message From Christchurch On The Value Of User-Generated Content | |||||||||||||
| by Kaila Colbin, | |||||||||||||
A friend gave mouth-to-mouth to a fallen man, through blood and bone and crushed teeth. The man died. Another, racing down the hill in his car to get to his young son at school, being blocked by rockfall, getting on a bike, arriving marginally further, ditching the bike, running, rounding the corner, seeing the collapsed cliff that had buried the back half of the school. The son is alive. A third, trapped on the first floor of a building with 25 students, being rescued by a nameless window cleaner who smashed the window and accompanied every person down his ladder, guiding their every step until everyone came out safe. Here is a taste of what you have to deal with in the aftermath of an earthquake: You have no power. This means your TV doesn't work, and neither does your Internet or your cordless phone. You can't recharge your cell phone, and you've used up all the batteries frantically trying to get through to your loved ones on the overloaded network. This, of course, is assuming you have your phone and didn't leave it behind, along with your wallet and your laptop, in the frenzied scramble to get out alive while the walls of your building collapsed around you. You have no water to drink, and none to flush the toilet, so you dig holes in the backyard. You may have lost your car, your office, your job, your home, your friend, your spouse. You have to surmount innumerable additional hurdles, deal with insurance companies and government agencies, itemize your destruction and fill out your paperwork: administrative and logistical distractions that require effort and attention just when you are at your lowest in terms of emotional and psychological resources. Here is some of what you need in the event of a natural disaster: You need to know your loved ones are alive and OK. You need to know where to get the water, which roads are open, whether any supermarkets are functioning, whether there is additional danger, where the nearest porta-potty is located, where you can get gas for the car. You need to know whether others' experience is better or worse than yours, who needs what kind of help, who is around to help you, and who is just around so you don't feel so desperately alone, so mortally terrified, and so full of grief and uncertainty. And here is what user-generated content does for you: It helps you find your loved ones. It tells you where the water is and which supermarkets are functioning. It connects you with those around you, whether they need help, can help you, or neither. If you happen to be overseas when disaster strikes at home, it helps you understand what is happening on the ground, not from a media perspective, but from the perspective of your neighbors, the people who are living and breathing this event, who will be picking up the pieces for years after the CNN and BBC cameras have left, who will have to rely on each other when the world's attention and sympathies inevitably refocus on the next disaster elsewhere. In a disaster, UGC is not here for your entertainment. It is not competing with network news for ad dollars. It does not care whether you think it should be pitted against the professionals for a journalism award. It is a way for people experiencing the most significant event of their lives to bear witness, to cry out their pain and their suffering and their need, to connect with people close by who are sharing the experience and with people far away who, but for their voices, might mistake these events for a blockbuster movie filmed on a sound stage. No human can fail to be moved by the horrific tragedy of Japan, made so real by the user-generated content coming from that ravaged coastline -- its very lack of professionalism making it so abundantly clear that there is no difference at all between us and them. In these turbulent times, we cannot afford to distance ourselves from the humanity at the other end of the camera, and from the reality that there but for the grace go we. I'm grateful for your user-generated content, on Twitter or in the comments. Stay safe out there. Source:http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=146980 | |||||||||||||
The following photographs have at least a few things in common:
1. They all feature human beings cleaning windows; human beings born, presumably, with brains.
2. They all illustrate a total lack of common sense on behalf of the cleaners in question, more often than not because they’re unable/unwilling to muster the time/money/brainpower necessary to do the cleaning safely.
3. They all make me depressed and strangely exhilarated. I’m sure you’ll experience a similarly thrilling level of discomfort.
Hold on tight.
Above: An old lady does the unthinkable and cleans her window from the comfort of the sill, in what looks like snowy weather.
Above: An intelligent chap, determined not to be beaten by the unreachable, rests his ladder on a ledge barely deep enough to hold it.
Above: 400ft up, on the 34th floor of a hotel in Dubai, a bright young man cleans a window and proceeds to make all onlookers instantly queasy.
Above: This guy’s barely even gripping the building as he unprofessionally attempts to cut corners.
Above: Words can’t describe just how insane this is.
Above: Numerous students at Liaoning University in China decide to dice with death simultaneously and clean their windows with reckless abandon.
Above: Vintage window cleaning insanity from 1985.
Source:http://www.master-cleaners.co.uk/blog/how-not-to-clean-a-window/
UNIVERSITY CITY - March 2, 2011 (WPVI) -- A window washer is in critical condition after plummeting four stories on Wednesday morning in Philadelphia.
It happened at the intersection of 38th and Spruce in the University city section around 9:30 a.m.
The man reportedly fell from a scaffolding.
The man, who is between 20 and 30 years old, was rushed to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in critical condition with head injuries.
Police are now investigating how this fall happened.
The name of the man who was injured has not yet been released.
Last Updated: Mar 2, 2011
Electra Street, between Airport and Muroor Roads, has been closed for several hours today as emergency crews rescued workers trapped by high winds.
Two men were working on high rise cradle, cleaning windows at the Sama Tower, close to the NMC hospital when the winds picked up.
They could not lower the cradle safely and police and emergency crews were called to the scene near the New York University faculty and students.
Traffic was diverted from the area while police rescue efforts helped two men off the window cleaning cranes, which had flipped due to strong winds.
The men were helped back into the building through a window on the 36th floor. No-one was injured.
Source:http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/road-shut-near-nmc-hospital
Eyewitnesses and an Abu Dhabi Police rescue personnel at the scene said the accident may have been caused by strong winds that forced the window cleaning cradle to twist and move to the other side.
The 50-storey building, Salma Tower, is located on Zayed the Second Street (widely known as Electra Street). The two workers were cleaning the building on the side facing the street when strong winds swung the cradle as it was coming down. Its four parallel metallic cables got twisted, seizing the motor. With the cables twisted the cradle, which was also a bit tilted, could neither move up nor down.
The cradle hung on the 37th floor with no windows to pull the cleaners in, making it more difficult for the rescue operation. They were later rescued from the windows on the 38th and 39th floors. The cleaners were lifted with the help of safety jackets tied with strong strings, while on the ground a huge inflated mattress was laid for further safety.
“The rescue teams are busy trying to bring them down safely. Every effort is being made to save their lives. The strong winds are creating hurdles but they will be rescued safely,” the personnel from the Abu Dhabi Police said while the rescue operation was going on
Strong teams of the Civil Defence, Rescue and Emergency Unit at the Abu Dhabi Police, paramedics and the Traffic and Patrols Department reached the spot on time and cordoned off the surrounding area. An eyewitness said the accident happened at around 2pm. Strong winds were blowing at that time he said.
“I was walking near the building when I heard a huge sound. I looked up to see the cleaning cradle with two workers stuck on the other side of the building facing the new NMC Specialty Hospital building. The cradle came to the left side of the building from the Electra Street side,” he narrated.
The rescue drama continued for over three hours with the horrified public on the ground praying for the lives of the cleaners. Immediately after their rescue, the two workers were assisted and consoled by paramedics and other experts.
The cherry picker was being used to clean windows on the Banana Republic building between Grant Avenue and Kearny Street when it punctured the sidewalk at around 2:15 a.m.
It created a hole that measured about four feet by seven feet, Public Works spokeswoman Gloria Chan said.
The machine operator was not injured, and called police for assistance.
City engineers have assessed the damage and determined that no serious structural damage was done to the street or building, Chan said.
A construction company was at the site this morning installing steel plates to secure the sidewalk for pedestrians.
Mel Annuzzi, co-owner of Annuzzi Construction, said the collapse was at least partially due to the fact that the part of the sidewalk where the collapse occurred was not reinforced.
Annuzzi expects to finish the temporary installment by 1 p.m. today.
The cherry picker has been removed, and Sutter Street was reopened to traffic at about 10 a.m., Chan said.
Owners of the building will pay to reconstruct the sidewalk, Chan.
The collapse hasn't hurt business for Banana Republic and the store was open at 10 a.m. despite the fact that the hole leads to the store's stockroom, manager Na Yong said.
"There was minimal defective merchandise that was damaged," Yong said.
The store is offering discounts to customers today due to the inconvenience, she said.
8:14 AM: KTVU broadcast is reporting that Sutter Street is closed between Kearny and Grant after a window washer's cherry-picker rig collapsed at 2 AM, damaging the sidewalk.
According to a city engineer KTVU spoke with, the window washer wasn't supposed to be using that style of what he called a "fork lift," which at 25,000 pounds was too heavy to be supported by the sidewalk, which was atop an open, basement area, not solid ground.
"Luckily" the engineer told KTVU, the cherry picker "fell between two beams that are supporting this sidewalk" while washing the windows of the Grant Street Banana Republic.
The engineer expects that it'll take another hour to remove the window washer's rig. According to the engineer, they have calculated that no damage was done to the beams, and the street remains safe to use.
No one was injured in the incident.
