- I got an email from an energy company that said,
"Hi, Tom. We own a wind turbine. Do you want to go up to the top of it?"
And of course I said yes, but then I asked,
could I leave by the emergency exit?
And for some reason they said yes.
- This is a 50 metre EWT turbine, which is capable
of producing 500 kilowatts of energy.
In blade repair, we have to repair turbines all over Europe.
So, every day you need to climb a turbine.
You shut it off at the bottom. You climb up.
You pin the turbine
and pin the blades that you're going to work on.
You're going to attach to the top, abseil out,
and do your repairs on the blades that need repairing.
- Anyone climbing or descending this ladder
has to be attached to a fall arrest system.
It's a clever bit of technology.
If you move at a normal speed, it'll move along with you.
But if you fall, it'll notice and it'll catch you.
Fast enough to be safe,
not so fast that it's as brutal as hitting the ground would be.
- On the ladder that we climb up on the inside,
there is a fixed steel cable.
And on this, you attach a slider,
which is a metal device and you open up a gate inside.
And this is where the cable runs
and the gate then closes onto the cable.
Shut the hatch, screw it together.
And this attaches to your sternum.
So as you're climbing up, this will follow you up the cable.
And then if you fell, it would lock into position.
It'll brake. That's your braking system.
You're always connected by two points.
Personally, I believe it's a safer job than anything else you can do
because of all the backups we use.
For instance, it's much more dangerous to climb a ladder
six foot off the ground
than it is to work 50 metres up in the air
when you've got all your attachment points.
In my opinion.
- If you're climbing this turbine, you need a fail safe.
Which is one of the reasons there's an emergency exit at the top.
Right, here we go.
- The emergency descenders come in different guises
but the one that's at the top there,
we only train with it once every two years,
because it's always the worst case scenario if you have to get that out.
It's an inertia device. If you just clip it to yourself,
you'll lower down to the ground under its own steam,
and you can brake but, generally, you'll just hit the ground at a safe speed.
You don't train with it very often because in real world
you should never have to use it
because you've got lots of other things to fail first,
before you even have to think about using that.
There's instructions written on it as well, on how to use it.
- So step to the left? - Take a step round here, yeah.
- To access a turbine,
you need to do something called a GWO, "Global Wind Organisation",
and you can't access the turbine
and use any of the equipment inside without that training.
That teaches about working at height and how to use one of those devices
to get the casualties down.
And then to do what we do, which is abseiling on the blades,
You need to do something called a IRATA qualification,
which is rope access, basically.
And so it's quite a lengthy process before you're even out there.
- There is actually an emergency exit sign up here.
I love that.
- This is a direct drive turbine, meaning that there's no gear in it.
It's all just magnets up in that doughnut, you can see right at the top.
- So, this is the centre of the turbine.
- That there is the whole rotor. It's a giant electromagnet.
There are very few worst case scenarios where
the turbine is going to be fine, but the ladder down isn't.
Now, if any of those happen, then yes,
the team here are all thoroughly trained for it.
They'll all be able to get down on the emergency descender.
But that's not why it's here.
The most likely reason for that to be used
is for one person.
Somebody who's twisted their ankle or passed out, or for whatever reason,
can't get down the ladder on their own.
- Yes, that's my understanding. It would be specific to the injury.
If we couldn't move the casualty,
then they would have to figure a way of doing that.
You'd have to be something serious.
A heart attack, you can always get someone down.
But if someone had a broken neck, yeah, it will be a different scenario.
- Oh, look at that view!
- We do medicals to get onto the turbines
and we have to maintain those medicals bi-yearly.
And that proves your fitness to climb the turbines
and medicals are quite in-depth.
So if you knew you were ill,
you would be fairly irresponsible to go and climb a turbine.
- Yep. That's okay to step on?
- Yeah. Promise you! If you sit back, legs straight and lean backwards.
Keep going, keep going.
Don't hold on.
- Oh!
- Don't hold on.
- Oh. Oh, okay.
That's the nerve-wracking bit.
- That's it, keep going.
- Yep. I've got two wires on me.
I've got two wires on me. I've got two wires on me.
- And now walk, but don't bend in your legs.
That's it.
Keep going.
- Okay. I've got two wires on me.
- And you can slowly bend your knees a little bit if you want to.
- I've got two wires.
That's fine.
Okay.
- Happy?
- Happy!
- See you in a little while.
- Okay!
"One thing I should mention in voiceover, because I forgot to say it
"while convincing my brain to switch from trusting my legs to trusting the ropes:
"there is a way to get someone onto the descender
"if they're out cold or they can't walk.
"It's just that I could walk.
"So I did a standard abseil down the first part."
And that's it. I'm descending!
Rigging this up required a lot of skill and training
from the folks up there.
But to descend, you don't even need to be conscious.
And that's by design.
All I need to do now is sit and wait until I safely reach the ground.
- When you actually work on a turbine, the view at the top is always amazing.
So when you have a look around, you do remember that
oh, it's pretty cool job, actually.
- Thank you very much to all the team at Octopus Energy and at EWT.
You can find links to them in the description.
That's a wrap. Thank you very much!
- Well done!