Our Brake-Assisting Belay Device Can Fail! Three Plaquette Risks and Mitigations

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Low probability, high consequence. That’s the tricky thing about many causes of climbing accidents.

My dad was a nuclear engineer. His career was dedicated to risk assessments at nuclear facilities. At the beginning of his career, in the 1970s, that was primarily about mechanical systems: how likely is it that the part breaks AND the backup AND the failsafe, etc. In the middle of his career, it was about human error: how likely is it that a control-room engineer goes through the safety protocol correctly if there is a fire in that control room. At the end of his career, it was about terrorism: how likely is it that someone can fly a plane into the side of this powerplant.

The idea was to create mathematical models to answer these (and many similar) questions so that we could spend our time, energy, and money on mitigating the most significant risks. At the heart of all of those calculations, regardless of problem statement, was the simple notion that risk = probability x consequence. In other words, we can high “high” risks either from very significant consequences, like a reactor meltdown, or from lower consequence but very high probability events, like human error.

What their work found, and changed an entire industry’s thinking about, is that (as a sweeping generalization), we can spend time chipping away at the low probabilities by doing a bunch of little things. It is nearly impossible to do a “big thing” that “stops” the big consequence form happening. You don’t “stop a meltdown.” You do lots of little things that stop a bunch of small issues from happening. That makes things safer at each stop in the event chain by creating breaks in the event chain you also dramatically decrease the likelihood that some large sequence of many events all happen in the wrong order and the result is a meltdown.

Basically, if we focus on only the big things that almost never happen, we miss the small things that can happen one after the other in a way that adds up to a big thing. But if we work on all the small things, we make it hard for all those “one after the other” events to stack up.

I think about climbing safety in much the same way. I like to find little risk mitigations that reduced likelihood of a big thing happening.

Sure, freakish events can still happen. An airplane may fall out of the sky and wipe me off my route. Or, less sarcastically, maybe a quick draw can get wedged in a bolt as I climb by and unclip itself (which has happened in the world, although extremely rarely and never to me).

Since those freakish things are difficult-to-impossible to mitigate, I spend my time on all the little things I have more direct control over. The issues described in this video fall into that latter category. I can mitigate the issues of coming into an anchor on a traversing pitch (see the second issue raised in the video, please) by very little things centered on awareness of the potential issue and then acting upon that awareness with very “low cost” (in terms of time or effort) mitigations like placing the last piece of pro very near the anchor or making sure I maintain hold the break strands (which we should be doing anyways) as the last pieces of protection are being reached by the followers.

Little, low-cost things.