Name: Taking The Emergency Exit From A Wind Turbine
Uploaded: 2025-03-24T10:25:08.000Z
Duration: 5 min 36 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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?

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, pin the blade that you're going to work on, you then attach the top, abseil out, and you do your repairs on the blades that you 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 it 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, this is where the cable runs, and the gate then closes onto the cable, it's shut, and I actually 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 break, that's your braking system.

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 meters 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.

The emergency descenders come in different guises, but the one that's up 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.

If you just clip it to yourself, you'll lower down to the ground under its own steam and you can break, 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.

To access a turbine, you need to do something called a GWO, which is Global Wind Organization, and you can't access the turbine and use any of the equipment inside or out of the training.

And our teachers are working at height on how to use one of those devices to get 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.

So it's quite a lengthy process before you're even out there.

There is actually an emergency exit sign up here.

This is a direct drive turbine, meaning that there's no gearing in it.

It's all just magnets up in the donut that you can see right at the top.

That there is, well, the hull and the rotor.

There are very few worst-case scenarios where the turbine's going to be fine, but the ladder down isn't.

Now, if any of those happen, then yeah, the team here are all thoroughly trained for it.

They'll all be able to get down on the emergency descender.

The most likely reason for that to be used is for one person, someone who's twisted their ankle or passed out for whatever reason, can't get down the ladder on their own.

Were they right to say the emergency services won't climb the turbine?

If you couldn't move the casualty, then they would have to figure a way of doing it.

A heart attack, you can always get someone down.

But someone had a broken neck, yeah, it will be a different scenario.

We do medicals to get onto the turbines and we have to maintain those medicals by yearly.

And that proves your fitness to climb the turbines and the medicals are quite in-depth.

Say you knew you were ill, you would be fairly irresponsible to go and climb a turbine.

If you sit back, keep your legs straight, lean backwards.

And you can slowly bend your knees a little bit if you want to, if it makes you feel more comfortable.

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.

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.

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 out the top is always amazing.

So when you have a look around, you do remember that, oh, that's a 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.