Redundancy for saftey!

Since I spent so much of the weekend doing saftey checks, I have saftey on my mind. And I thought some of you may be interested in the redundancy put in place to keep you safe. You see the crash mats and super visible things we use, but do you know that the attachment points also have extra measures to keep you safe? If you read my blog yesterday, you know that the aerial structure and plates are super cool. All our carabiners are top of the line and autolocking so there can’t be mistakes. But what about the piece between? An attachment is only as strong as it’s weakest link right?
Between the steel plate and carabiner is a 1/2 inch steel shackle. These babies are rated to 15,000 lb. So yeah, it’s got you and a car. When I installed it, I also put in two additional redundancies in to make sure it couldn’t fail. A shackle is basicly a pin that screws into one end. The first thing I did was put lock tight on the screw end so that I basically glued it shut. This is so vibrations couldn’t work the pin loose in any way. Then for a second saftey feature I zip tied the end. This makes it impossible for the pin to turn so it can’t come undone. So with my additional redundancies, there is no way one of these guys can come unscrewed and fail.
With our procedures, the weakest link in our aerial set-up is actually the fabric! Everything above you is rated for thousands of pounds while the aerial hammock is only rated for 2,200. Yes, that’s correct, you have exert 2,200 pounds of force before you have to worry about anything. There isn’t any way the human body can do that without actually hurting yourself, we aren’t made to withstand those types of forces without protection. After about 1,500 pounds of force you’ll start to break bones. In the aerial arts the most you realistically generate is 750 pounds. So I think it is safe to say we have you covered!