Orienting Climbing Carabiners at Your Anchor: the Finer Points
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My dad was a nuclear engineer for an entire career focused on risk assessment and mitigation. He started out in the early 1970s, as the United States was still building power plants. So, early in his career, his job was mostly about modeling the mechanical flows (this pipe leads to this valve that leads to this, etc.) and calculating the likelihood of a sub-system failure based on the likelihood of individual part failures. Obviously, the more critical the sub-system, the more redundancy demanded. Later in his career, it moved on to human factors: what is the likelihood of the engineers in the control room performing safety protocols correctly if there is a fire in that control room? And just before he retired, it was all about terrorism: what is the likelihood of someone trying to fly a plane into the side of a power plant?
If I were to try to come up with a common theme that spanned throughout his career, it would be this: the fairly persistent finding that once you do the math, you discover most people over emphasize the highest consequence risks - which are usually rare - and underemphasize the lower-consequence but higher probability risks.
As a reminder, to engineers and risk management professionals, risk equals probability times consequence (R = P x C). So, you can end up with high risk by having either lots of likelihood or lots of consequence, and it so happens that the “easier to understand” high-consequence outcomes tend to be the focus of most people because they are simpler. In most instances, it’s not the tornado that brings down the house, it’s the lack of maintenance over time with each missed step along that path having a comparatively mild consequence… until it doesn’t anymore.
It’s with the above in mind that I offer this video on orienting our carabiners in ways that nudge up our climbing efficiency and safety. It is very unlikely to be any once circumstance that ends up in disaster from orienting a carabiner at an anchor in a way that goes against some of the principles I outline in the video. But what if multiple factors converge? Just take the example of getting scars and metal slivers on a carabiner from clipping to bolts? Well, it seems very unlikely that doing that once will matter… or twice… or so on. But, I have carabiners that are now well scarred from many clips to steel bolts. I don’t know when those scars became bad enough that I wouldn’t want to run a rope over them and risk damaging the rope, but for some of those older carabiners, it has.
So, take a look. But, don’t treat these principles as “thou must” statements. Rule-based decision making in the dynamic outdoors can lead to applying a rule to a situation in which the rule simply doesn’t make sense. Please do, however, think about what the sum of little measures of added safety and efficiency (and efficiency is safety on long routes where weather and other hazards come into play) might be worth it.
It’s failing the routine maintenance of the house, not the tornado.
As I often do for those gear aficionados watching, here is some of the equipment that features in the video:
Black Diamond Equipment HotForge Screwgate carabiner (“D” shape)
Petzl Attache screwgate carabiner (medium sized HMS)
Petzl William screwgate carabiner (large sized HMS)
CAMP USA Dyon carabiner (wiregate)