Do you have one of the scariest jobs in America?

(WXYZ) - It's no surprise that window washers may have one of the scariest jobs in America, but what about teachers?

A new survey from CareerBuilder found teaching is one of the top ten scariest professions.

More than 4,300 workers voted in a nationwide survey.

A bomb squad technician was voted the scariest job. A high-rise window washer was second. Rounding out the top five; serving in the Armed Forces, mining and a policing.

A teacher ranked ninth.

Workers also voted on what makes a job scary. Fear of pay cuts received the most votes, with 13 percent.

Nine percent of workers said workload and presenting in front of other people makes a job scary.

Only three percent said their boss made work scary.

You can view the top 15 scariest jobs below.

1. Bomb Squad Technician
2. High Rise Window Washer
3. Armed Forces
4. Miner
5. Police Officer
6. Alaskan Crab Fishing
7. Mortician
8. Firefighter
9. High School Teacher
10. Cemetery Worker
11. Exterminator
12. Stand-Up Comedian
13. Animal Control
14. Stunt Person
15. Politicia

Read more: http://www.wxyz.com/dpp/news/do-you-have-one-of-the-scariest-jobs-in-america%3F#ixzz1c7x9hVmq

Dad's boss pays for intensive therapy

Matthew Gal uses his arms to increase his upper body strength during therapy [Photo by Photo provided by Euro-Peds]

Piotr Gal had no idea that Edward, a new fellow worker at his commercial window washing job, was actually the company president, Henrik Slipsager.

Gal, who lives in Bridgeview, also had no idea that his 7-year-old son, Matthew, who has cerebral palsy, would be touched by Slipsager's deep-pocketed generosity.

Posing as a Dutch immigrant seeking a full-time job, Slipsager learned several positions from his own workers at ABM, a maintenance services company with locations throughout the country. The workers did not know Slipsager's true identity. He did this for an episode of the popular CBS TV show "Undercover Boss," which allows CEOs to pretend they are merely workers to see their company from the ground up.

Gal, who's from Poland, struck up an easy relationship with Slipsager, a fellow immigrant, on the first day of "training" him to clean high-rise windows in downtown Chicago.

"I've got three kids and been married 13 years already," Gal told Slipsager as they set up a safety cable on the roof of the high rise.

"Good for you," replied Slipsager, who was visibly scared as the shaky scaffolding climbed the side of the high rise.

"My life is kind of hard. My son is 7 years old and he has cerebral palsy. He's not walking, not talking. That's the hardest thing," Gal told him. "He gets therapy for a month… in Europe. Poland. The ticket is $1,700… too much."

Gal, an ABM window washer supervisor of 14 years, revealed his dream to take his son to a specialized intensive therapy program in Pontiac, Mich. The program, inspired by a program in Poland, is called Euro-Peds and it's based at Doctors' Hospital of Michigan, where children with cerebral palsy are given personalized therapy to learn new skills.

The only catch was that Gal's health insurance would not cover the cost of the program, so he considered moving back to Poland.

"It would break my heart for a guy like Piotr to leave this company to help his son," Slipsager told TV viewers during the show's airing months later.

By the show's end, the truth came out when Gal was summoned to the company's New York City headquarters for an "evaluation" of Edward's work.

There, Slipsager revealed his secret to Gal and informed him that ABM would fund two intensive-therapy Euro-Peds sessions for Matthew. That included all travel and hotel expenses for each two-week period, in addition to the $6,000 for the program.

Gal's son Matthew arrived at the Euro-Peds program for his first two-week session on Jan. 31. He participated in specialized "suit therapy," working with specially-trained therapists 20 hours a week to learn to walk independently.

"Matthew can walk, but he gets tired easily and he doesn't have the balance or confidence to walk independently," Gal says. "I would like to see him become more stable and strong."

It is typical for Euro-Peds' young patients to return for intensive therapy a couple times a year, especially during growth spurts. The goal is to give children time over a two- to three-week period to learn new skills and gain enough strength to carry out those skills in a real-life setting, according to spokeswoman Anne Mancour.

"In Matthew's case, he has more weakness and balance issues and he will benefit from regular therapy and occasional bouts of intensive therapy to bump him up to his next functional skill level," Mancour says.

Matthew's second two-week session ended July 22 and, according to his lead therapist, he did wonderfully.

"He worked hard and was a pleasure to treat, always smiling," says Mel McGinnis, a senior intensive pediatric physical therapist.

The therapy's goals focused on skills that involved strength, balance and function, including tall kneeling, static standing balance, ascending and descending stairs and beginning to take independent steps, she says.

"Through his 40 hours of intense strengthening and repetition of these tasks, he improved all of them," McGinnis says. "But perhaps the most exciting of all his gains was the increase in his independent stepping."

This was such a significant improvement that his parents noticed immediate changes at the Michigan hotel as well. There, Matthew would walk into a room, stop to look around, and then turn and walk into another room, they say.

Gal could only echo what he initially told Slipsager through tears that day in his boss' New York City office: "Thank you, thank you very much.

Authorities ID window washer killed in fall

ST. LOUIS PARK, Minn. -- Authorities have identified the window washer who plunged eight stories to his death on Friday afternoon in St. Louis Park.

The Hennepin County Medical Examiner says 25-year-old Ryan Shannon of Roseville died of multiple blunt force injuries after falling from the roof of the Knollwood Place Apartments. His death has been classified as an accident.

OSHA has been called in to investigate the accident.

(Copyright 2011 by KARE. All Rights Reserved.)

The Loneliness of the Skycraper Window-Washer

"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."

Source:http://brooklynology.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/post/2011/03/24/The-Loneliness-of-the-Skyscraper-Window-Washer.aspx

Window washer falls 4 stories in University City in Critical Condition

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.

(Copyright ©2011 WPVI-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved.)

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/local&id=7990192

Worker cleaning windows stuck on high rise cradle

Road shut near NMC hospital

Hala Khalaf

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

How a Skyscraper Window Washer Faces Death (Sep, 1934)

How a Skyscraper Window Washer Faces Death

by FRED A. BELL

HAILED as supermen, stunt artists are paid fabulous sums to risk their necks for a thrill-hungry public; yet their most hair-raising feats are duplicated every day by the daring men who clean the windows of the nation’s towering skyscrapers.

Perched at dizzy heights on window ledges barely wide enough to afford a toehold, the aces of the window brigade put circus acrobats and parachute jumpers to shame. For there is no margin of error—no nets or parachutes to break a possible fall. An error in judgment, a slip of the life belt and the window cleaner has signed his own death warrant. Below him there is nothing but a yawning city canyon—a square of concrete pavement to land and die on.

One of the men best qualified to paint the thrills and dangers of this hazardous profession is Richart Hart, chief of the window polishing squad of the Empire State Building, the tallest structure ever reared by man.

Hart spent ten years mining coal in the Pennsylvania coal fields before he decided he wanted an open air job such as window cleaning. Down at Wilkes-Barre he tunneled for coal as far as 2,000 feet into the bowels of the earth. Now he thinks nothing of cleaning glass at 1,250 feet, which is the tip of the Empire State Building.

“Working with a hand-pick and shovel in the depths of the coal mines,” Hart says, “was a snap compared to brushing up a window pane on the 85th floor of the Empire State Building.

“Every morning when you went down the shaft for another day in the mine, you just resigned yourself to Fate, and if the heaviside layer of coal and rock was going to crumble over you that day, well, you figured there was nothing you could do about it anyway. It was just bound to happen.

“Now with the sparrows—that’s what they nickname us because “we can perch anywhere—it’s different, You can be the master of your own fate by being careful and alert. There’s no reason for feeling it’s the end every day.”

“We have our own window cleaning department in the Empire State Building. Three years ago I had close to fifty men under me; but it’s been a case of the survival of the fittest, until today I have just eight. But they don’t come any better. They’re hand-picked men and crackerjacks at their trade. I don’t mean that their former comrades have kicked the bucket. They’ve just wandered off to other jobs where the knees don’t get jittery from prancing around at dizzy heights.

“Last year one of my best window-cleaners decided to quit. He was 65 years old, had been in the business 41 years and wanted a rest. The other day 1 ran into him and he told me that he missed the work and had gone back to polishing panes. I guess the heights get in your blood after a while and you can’t stand what some folks call terra firma.

“The men folks who squawk when they have to clean a dozen windows in their homes will get some idea what a job we have when I say we have to keep 6,500 windows looking spick and span. We have to work fast, too, because there’s a lot of prejudice among office folks when the window cleaner barges in. Yet there’s a lot of fuss made if the windows don’t get prompt attention. So we’re always in the middle no matter how you look at it.

Window Cleaners’ Reward

“The eight men are divided in teams of two. Each team is responsible for 25 floors. Those who finish first have the reward of doing the upper stories which run up to the 102d floor. Then if they have done a good job I always let them have a little time on the Observation Tower, taking in some of the sights they don’t dare peek at while they’re minding their business.

“The mainstay of the window cleaner is his life belt. This is made of leather and goes around his midsection. It is very thick and each end hitches to a steel hook which protrudes from the side of the window where he is working. If one end of the belt should lose its grip, he would still be held by the other end. The steel brace in the back of the belt is so constructed that the leather cannot slip through it.

“We never work on rainy days. As a matter of fact, we take it easy in all kinds of stormy weather. The risk would be too great when a blizzard is raging. It’s bad enough on the streets in the skyscraper zone to say nothing of bucking the arctic gales 100 stories high and trying to put a shine on a window.

“Our jobs are most dangerous in the winter time, of course. The sills of the Empire State Building windows have a one and one-half inch margin. Look at your shoe and try to mark off one and one-half inches and then you realize what a window cleaner’s foothold must be 60 or 80 stories high.

Braving Wintry Hazards

“To give you some idea of the hazards of this business, let me picture the window cleaner’s problem on a cold winter morning. He goes to the 80th floor for work. The window is probably jammed because of the ice and cold. The sill on which he is to place his feet is sheathed in ice. He’s got to get out on that perch. No wasting of time to chip off or melt the ice. He’s got to make speed.

“His mind must be off danger. The mental hazard would lick him from the start if he gave in to it. He must remember that the first thing to do on opening the window— after he has securely adjusted the life belt to his body—is, to hook up one end of the belt to the window. Then he can step out and quickly attach his belt to the other hook.

“He must not unhook the second snap on his belt until he has placed his foot safely within the interior after finishing the job.

“The closest shave I ever had was while cleaning windows in a university which had classrooms in a skyscraper here. The idea was to have the windows cleaned during the fifteen minutes between class periods.

“I had finished one set of windows and was in a hurry to get to the next classroom. Instead of unhooking my belt and going all the way around, I decided on a short cut. I unhooked the belt and proceeded along a wall ledge, about eight feet long and six inches wide, carrying a pail and a ladder.

Death Hangs in the Balance

“Just as I got to the middle, I began to wobble. My toe-hold was failing. I had allowed one foot to get out a little too far, just enough to upset my balance. I stood still, or tried to. I teetered a little but I kept calm. I was facing the building wall, trying to hug it with my body. I glanced down over my shoulder and saw a cop standing below. There was nothing he could do. I was ten stories up, and on the verge of falling.

“In the end I managed to regain my balance and my hold. I wormed my way over to the next window and went right on with my job as if nothing had happened. That’s the worst jam I was ever in. That might have been the one fall allotted me—and fatal!

“There is a standing army of 3,000 window cleaners in New York.City, and it’s my guess that we have the biggest mortality rate of any working class in the world. Most insurance companies won’t have anything to do with us. We’re marked ‘V. P. R.’—very poor risk.

“The average window cleaner gets $30 weekly for 48 hours under the NRA. Aside from the perils, it’s nice, clean, healthy outdoor work, and we have very little labor trouble. You see, this is one trade in which there are no strikebreakers.

“When a man applies to me for a job, I don’t listen to any hot air about how good he is. I hand him the equipment, take him to the 100th floor, show him what a swell sight it is, to see all the other big skyscrapers sprawled out below, and then I say, ‘Okay, my man, go to it. Tackle that window right there.’

“I’ve never seen it fail. If they’re not full-fledged window cleaners they quit right on the spot. It takes a lot of nerve to step out into space, 100 stories up, if you’re not made for it.

“I’m forty years old and like my job very much. We’re all a happy-go-lucky bunch and sleep a good ten hours every night. We eat lightly. You’ve got to. On Sundays we have a feast, however. I’ve got a son, 15, and he’s going to be an engineer. He says he doesn’t care much for the wide open spaces where his old man works. Well, maybe I can’t blame him after all for not wanting to lead a sparrow’s life.”

Source:http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/05/20/how-a-skyscraper-window-washer-faces-death/

Adventures of a high-rise window cleaner

After cycling from Toronto to the West Coast and back, then sailing from Scarborough to Iceland, K.C. Maple was having trouble adjusting to the confined life within the tall towers of Toronto.

That was until he found a job that let him climb to the top and dangle off of them.

For the past two and a half years, the 24-year-old with long, blond hair pulled back in a ponytail has washed the windows of Toronto’s highrise buildings. It was on the way to a native sun dance ceremony that the part-Swede, part-aboriginal met a man who cleaned windows for a living.

“That was the pivotal point that brought me into the joy of this business,” he says. He is sometimes afraid, but mostly he enjoys the thrill of being up so high. And the money is good. He tells me a beginner who works fast can usually make around $50,000 a year.

“It’s great to be paid to go out there, have a little danger and have some fun,” he says. “I’ve always wanted adventure, excitement, physical danger.”

Maple spends his days speeding up elevators with 250 feet of ropes draped over his shoulders, then lowering the rope down the side of buildings and repelling on a small plywood seat, holding a couple of squeegees, a suction cup to help him keep close to the windows and a five-gallon bucket filled with water and dish soap.

It’s great exercise, especially pulling the ropes up at the end of the day — “From a fitness standpoint, you’ve got a lot of reps,” he explains.

Instead of feeling trapped within the walls of a crowded city, he feels liberated in scaling them.

“I love the peace out there — on the outside of the building. You’re not inside the fishbowl.”

And what he finds on the highrise windows, besides layers of dust, bird feces and grease from unburned fuel, is an urban ecosystem. There are spiders, birds of all types and far too many midges for his liking — a midge can leave a long streak on a window if it gets caught between the squeegee and the glass.

Even the peregrine falcon at Yonge and Eglinton has warmed up to him. “He used to scream when I’d come up,” he says. “But over the last year and a half he doesn’t make noise.”

Then, of course, there’s the life on the other side of the glass. Maple tells me that despite what people might imagine, he isn’t usually looking through the glass, but at it. Sometimes, though, he will be distracted by a stunning condo interior, or a cluttered one. Other times, people will wave to get his attention.

“I have people showing me their babies a lot,” he says. But really, he admits, they’re probably showing their babies the window cleaner.

I ask him how long he thinks he will do this job.

“Until I can come down,” he says, referring to his passion for the work. “I can’t see myself doing anything else.”

Source: http://www.durhamcentral.com/adventures-of-a-high-rise-window-cleaner/