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The first thing we are going to look at is that of a tripod. Now, tripods come in from various manufacturers and can look slightly different from each other. What is the purpose of the tripod? Well, this is for the retrieval of someone in an emergency situation. So let us just have a quick look at this particular one. It is of an aluminium construction and they are designed with adjustable legs to go higher and higher. We try to attain ideally eight foot in the air, that would allow a person to be fully extricated from a confined space. Attached to this will be a man-riding winch. A mat goes through these pulley systems, fits down here into the middle, and once it is set in place we are ready to go in case of an emergency. So a tripod in many situations is the ideal piece of equipment as part of your emergency plan.
Here we have an inertial lifeline that would usually be connected to this hook on the tripod here. Next, we have the actual man-riding winch. Now, the purpose of the man-riding winch is to be able to retrieve someone in an emergency. This would be clamped to one of these legs. We have the handle where you operate it, and it has a two-stage system. With this little lever here on the side, that is like a clutch. You pull the clutch out, push the handle in. That means I am able to wind up and wind down someone. Pull the clutch out, pull the handle out, it is now in what we call free mode, so the whole thing allows a person to move up and down. But in an emergency, again, if there is inertia fitted to it, like a seatbelt, it would stop someone from falling. Just the same as that has got, the same principle of a seatbelt, it stops somebody from falling. So these are two additional pieces of equipment we would normally associate with the tripod. Finally, we have got a strop. It may well be that this tripod is not suitable for the job we are doing, in which case, we could find a girder or some other fixed point, put the strop around it, and then we would hang the actual man-riding winch on to it. Therefore, we have still got a retrieval system in place in case of an emergency.
