Industrial climbers carry out rope-secured maintenance work on large German refinery

At a height of about 30 meters, the rope access tech­ni­cians replace a heat­ing tape and the asso­ci­at­ed insu­la­tion on a pipeline. To get to the site, they abseil down from the top plat­form of a col­umn at a height of 30 meters and car­ry out the work secured by the rope. Com­pared to erect­ing scaf­fold­ing, the Bil­fin­ger team thus imple­ments the main­te­nance in a very short time and with a sig­nif­i­cant cost sav­ing for the customer.

 
“With the rope access and posi­tion­ing tech­nique work meth­ods, our climbers car­ry out the main­te­nance work for our client in a very time- and cost-effi­cient man­ner and in accor­dance with the high­est occu­pa­tion­al safe­ty stan­dards. In fact, rope access is a very safe way to per­form work at such a height. After all, erect­ing scaf­fold­ing for this par­tic­u­lar project would take about 20 times as long as access by rope. The rapid imple­men­ta­tion also sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduces the poten­tial risk to adja­cent areas.”
— Chris­t­ian Grauert, Project Man­ag­er Access Technology

 
In the process, the com­pa­ny can look back on a good safe­ty record: since 2012, there has not been a lost-time acci­dent dur­ing work at the refin­ery, where an aver­age of more than 100 employ­ees are on duty. Over two mil­lion hours of work have been safe­ly com­plet­ed by the team on site with­out an accident.
This is the first time that Bil­fin­ger has used rope access and posi­tion­ing tech­nol­o­gy at this refin­ery. The indus­tri­al ser­vices provider has already been car­ry­ing out indus­tri­al scaf­fold­ing and cor­ro­sion pro­tec­tion work there since 2010.
In the most recent con­tract exten­sion, the Group and the cus­tomer agreed for the first time on alter­na­tive access in addi­tion to scaf­fold­ing. Work using rope access and posi­tion­ing tech­nol­o­gy and the use of lift­ing plat­forms were con­trac­tu­al­ly pro­vid­ed for in addi­tion to the main scaf­fold erec­tion work in order to exploit the advan­tages of these tech­niques: very fast imple­men­ta­tion of the work at low cost and effort with guar­an­teed qual­i­ty of exe­cu­tion and high safe­ty. This is because the rope access and posi­tion­ing tech­nol­o­gy experts are com­mer­cial spe­cial­ists with voca­tion­al train­ing in the trades, such as met­al­work­ers, lock­smiths, plumbers or insu­la­tors. In addi­tion, they have a spe­cial qual­i­fi­ca­tion as rope access and posi­tion­ing tech­ni­cians, also known as “indus­tri­al climbers”.
In a new build­ing in Herne, the com­pa­ny will set up its own train­ing cen­ter for this pur­pose due to increas­ing cus­tomer demand for the flex­i­ble and effi­cient rope access and posi­tion­ing tech­nol­o­gy. The aim is to train fur­ther col­leagues before the end of 2021, e.g. insu­la­tion specialists.
In a train­ing course of up to 270 days, depend­ing on the lev­el of qual­i­fi­ca­tion, the indus­tri­al climbers will be spe­cial­ly trained for use “on the rope” and cer­ti­fied accord­ing to rec­og­nized stan­dards, such as the spec­i­fi­ca­tions of FISAT (Fach- und Inter­essen­ver­band für roilun­ter­stützte Arbeit­stech­niken e.V.). The team also includes col­leagues with qual­i­fi­ca­tions accord­ing to the inter­na­tion­al IRATA stan­dard and the stan­dard for work­ers at height accord­ing to Infor­ma­tion 212–001 of the Ger­man Social Acci­dent Insur­ance (DGUV).
Bil­fin­ger arn­holdt looks back on a com­pa­ny his­to­ry of more than 115 years and is one of Ger­many’s lead­ing indus­tri­al scaf­fold­ing ser­vice providers. Spe­cial­iz­ing in indus­tri­al and spe­cial­ty scaf­fold­ing, the com­pa­ny employs over 1,000 peo­ple at its head­quar­ters in Ober­hausen and its sev­en oth­er branch­es in Ger­many. On the site of the large refin­ery, Bil­fin­ger arn­holdt is the sole indus­tri­al scaf­fold­ing part­ner for main­te­nance and mod­ern­iza­tion work as well as the exe­cu­tion of con­ver­sion and expan­sion measures.
The com­pa­ny also uses rope-secured indus­tri­al climbers in oth­er coun­tries, for exam­ple in the UK for the main­te­nance of off­shore oil plat­forms or in Bel­gium and the Nether­lands on indus­tri­al plants.