Gear Failure on West Face Leaning Tower results in whipper.

The fall factor is the ratio of the length of the fall, without interruption, to the amount of rope out. The fall you describe is factor 1; 30' fall on 30' of rope.

The fall described in this thread would be a bona fide factor 2 fall if there were no gear in or bolts clipped. Those failures had to slow down the falling climber. I hope we hear from the OP regarding how much impact he felt as belayer when the biners broke...

Hmm, I wonder what a straight-gate carabiner that's broken by crossloading looks like.

It seems at for wire-gates, the point of failure during crossloading is the gate hinges:
blackdiamondequipment.com/e…

Of course, what happens in the lab is very different from what happens in the real world.

Hey all-

First off thanks for all the responses, feedback and well wishes. To say the least, Anthony and I felt good to get our feet on the ground after such weirdness. Just home from work and I'm stoked to see this thread lit up. It was a rattling experience for us both and my intent in the original post was to get some bearing on what the hell happened. There are a bunch of questions and requests for clarification I'll do my best to answer.

Firstly, the climber was definitely NOT leading with the static haul line, nor was the haul line clipped into the system or get caught on anything or absorb any of the impact of the fall. He would be dead and I would have been cut in half. He was trailing the haul line from his haul loop on his harness. After the fall, when he was hanging directly from my grigri on my belay loop, I fixed the haul line and he jugged back to the anchor.

The sequence of events: Anthony led the 7th pitch from the anchor at the top of the 6th pitch. He clipped the rope into three pieces before falling: 1st a bolt with an extended trad draw, 2nd a nut with an extended trad draw and 3rd a .5 c4 with an extended trad draw. After the fall, there was one of the rope side biners still on the rope. @~0:26 in the video you can see the trad draws still on the bolt and nut without the ropeside bent gate biners. Also--Anthony found the .5 c4 and draw minus the bent gate hung up on one of his aiders by some kind of luck. It was not clipped to it--it was tangled in it and he found it after the fall when he went to set up to jug. So on the way down, we figure his aider hooked the cam and pulled it as well. I agree that this all is pretty weird and a crazy string a ungodly bad luck. That's why I'm posting it here. Anthony and I have gone over the fall several times and so far, it seems like it was a pretty normal--even ideal situation up to the fall.

All three biners that resulted in the huge fall were Mammut bent gates on the rope side of my trad draws. All of my trad draws are composed of Mammut wire gates for the gear side, Mammut dyneema shoulder slings and the Mammut bent gates. The bent gates are rated at 24kN along the major axis, 8kN at the minor axis and 8kN open gate. One of my big questions: should i chuck the rest of my Mammut biners? I've never had any other problems, let alone a run of failure like this! ouch$$$.

At first we thought the biners cross loaded because how the hell do you break a biner in normal use? Gate flutter? I've never heard of that before and that's kinda scary. After looking at this: scroll down BD QC Lab's pics of cross loaded vs open/closed gate failed biners.

And from the one broken biner we have--at least that one did not cross load. I've been playing with the gates on the other mammut bent gates i have and they seem pretty firm and snappy--comparable to my other biners. The prospect of 'gate flutter' and that two of the things opened and snapped and another unclipped from a draw is an ugly thought.

Yes--I was glad (and so was Anthony!) that I was belaying him with a gri gri. I heard a metal popping noise (I now think it was one of the biners snapping) and a whir of air as he fell past me. Neither of us felt any of the protection pieces slow the fall--we both experienced it as one big drop. I realize that the three pieces of pro must have taken some of the force so it was not a true factor 2, but was definitely the bigest force I've felt from a fall. It happened very quickly, and with the rope coming down across my wrist (and as i found out later, my leg), and the force of the fall being arrested by my grigri/belay loop was pretty big. I dont think I let go of the brake end, but I'm not sure I would have arrested his fall immediately on an ATC. I'm glad to not have dealt with that. PS--Anthony weighs ~135-140 lbs I'd say. With the rack and all, maybe up to 155.

I'll try to get in touch with Mammut and see if they want some of these biners for inspection or whatever and report back.

thanks all.
shern.

It sure looks the same as open gate failure from black diamonds website.

The closed gate failure has the nose stretched down quite a bit. It would be great to get to the bottom of this.

Shern, has the distance between the nose and the spine increased? Notify Mammut ASAP.

alleyehave wrote:Shern, has the distance between the nose and the spine increased? Notify Mammut ASAP.

not sure--anthony has the broken biner as a keepsake. I'll ask him.

It doesn't take much of a fall factor to exceed the open-gate strength. If I have my entries right, I can get far below fall factor one with my favorite rope before combined forces drop below 8 kN:

Jay T's Force Calculator

Although I suspect a minor player in this accident, gri-gri's can produce higher forces than an ATC when catching a fall:

Geir Hundal's (see Myth 7) The Climbing Myth Busters

If the wall is curving outward, or the climber falls outward from a vertical wall, could be some wicked whip lash to a rope-side biner when:

• the top draw is pulled out some;
• which, as the rope goes taught, pulls the next-down draw out from the wall;
• the top draw somehow separates from the rope (sling trapped in gate?);
• the falling climber / rope slams down against the next "airborne" rope-biner;
• which then rapidly accelerates (pendulums) towards the wall.

Edit to add about the whiplash experienced by a rope-end biner: Consider that Shern was pulled up and into the wall hard enough to bite his lip and lose his glasses (?). And his body has many many more times the mass of a biner which would react much much more quickly to be jerked around.

I'm sticking to the easy leads where, if I fall, I'm more likely to get hurt hitting something. ;-P (Wait, I think I already did that.)

Shern indicated on the RC.com thread (maybe here too)"the cam was maybe 5' below the climber. not sure of anthony's rope brand, but can find out. 10.5 diameter."

Hopefully someone checks this ...

Using

• Jay T's Impact Force Calculator
• rope impact force rating of 9.2 kN
• the default friction factor of 0.3333
• 30 feet of rope out

I only need a fall factor of 0.36 for a 155 lb climber to reach 8 kN on the top piece.

If 30 feet of rope was indeed out, that's a 10.8 foot fall ... really close to the cam-to-climber distance plus that again for the length of the initial fall.

8 kN is even more likely to be exceeded if only 25 feet were out and/or if the draw on the cam puts the catch point a couple feet lower than the cam. But we lose some of that if we need to add the length of rope between the leader's feet and his waist tie-in point.

Needless to say, these circumstances (or circumstances very close to the real ones) are uncomfortably close to the open-gate breaking strength of this biner.

All that said, Jay's force calculator is of course theoretical. I haven't read what assumptions he makes about things like a somewhat upwardly mobile belayer.

It seems highly unlikely that three biners would fail on the same fall (either unclipping or breaking) without either user error or a design flaw.. I assume the climbers are experienced if on a big wall and screwing up clipping the rope to a draw thee times in a row seems unlikely. Even though I'm a big fan of Mammut, I won't be buying those biners any time soon.

T. Maino wrote: It seems highly unlikely that three biners would fail on the same fall (either unclipping or breaking) without either user error or a design flaw.

Three independent mechanisms would be amazing. It's possible there were just two independent mechanisms if the lower two failed in the same way: gate open.

yeah, the more I look at it, the more I think somehow the gates opened enough to basically create an open gate scenario which led to the failures.

Just for definition 'gate flutter,' a dangerous condition created by irregular impact forces generated by the climbing rope or contact with hard surfaces in a fall which momentarily opens the gate (and both lowers the breaking strength of the carabiner when open and potentially allows the rope to escape).

I think you ought to ditch the bent gates and go all wire gates, wire gates are much less likely to fall victim to gate flutter.

I'm especially thinking that since these bent gate biners were on the end of a long sling, maybe they managed to get the spine of the biner whipped against the rock and opened the gate.

Re the atc vs gri-gri debate, does anybody use an ATC on a wall? I don't usually advocate the use of gri-gri's especially for cragging and trad climbing, but if I'm belaying a 2 hour pitch, I'm using a gri-gri. I've even fallen asleep belaying before (maybe I need a partner that climbs faster)

John D wrote:Re the atc vs gri-gri debate, does anybody use an ATC on a wall? I don't usually advocate the use of gri-gri's especially for cragging and trad climbing, but if I'm belaying a 2 hour pitch, I'm using a gri-gri. I've even fallen asleep belaying before (maybe I need a partner that climbs faster)

I need to add that I have done extremely little aid climbing (i.e., one pitch). But I have heard the same thing from more experienced folks about the desire for gri-gri's for long leads on aid.

OK, one of the pieces pulled. So only 2 biners actually failed.

Pretty much everyone I know uses a Grigri for wall belays these days.

ROFL!!!!! I'm glad to not b the only one who gets bored at belays. The 'jerk on my head' & 'well the only hand' thing is hilarious

Russ Walling wrote:As for the biners breaking.... In the spirit of internet speculation, I'd go with bad luck, open gates, the Devil needing more souls, and probably some other factor yet injected into the conversation.

I got ya worried, huh Russ. I mean, probably neither you nor I are as light as Shern's partner. ;-)

No, really, you are right that the precise way it failed is hard to say.

Caprinae monkey wrote: There is a site you can check what kN force the falling climber generated: myoan.net/climbart/climbfor…

That calculator is completely bogus---it can't even get the fall factor right, and who knows what it is doing with the numbers after that. (I wrote them years ago but they have never taken it down.) The only online calculator I know of right now that is "accurate" in the sense that the mathematical model is correctly implemented is at jt512.dyndns.org/impactcalc.

The pictured broken biner is interesting. A cross-loaded biner will typically blow the gate out but not break the rest of the body. Open and closed-gate failures can break the carabiner spine at the narrow end as occurred here, or nearer to the wide end. I wonder whether the location of the break in tests has to do with different testing protocols. In the closed-gate failure, the wide end is held in place by the gate and gets deformed into a sharper curve by the load until the spine breaks. It is hard to get such loads, even with a grigri and well-used rope. In the open-gate failure, the wide end gets bent down to a shallower curve until the spine breaks---this type of failure is far more likely because the forces required are much lower.

The picture looks like a gate-open failure since the curve of the wide part hasn't been noticeably narrowed. Still, it makes me wonder if the biners were used for sport climbing and if so, if they were gouged by a bolt hanger.

rgold wrote:The only online calculator I know of right now that is "accurate" in the sense that the mathematical model is correctly implemented is at [[ jt512.dyndns.org/impactcalc.

Just to be clear, the above calculator is the same one I linked with the text "JT's Force Calculator" and "JT's Impact Force Calculator". All three of these references lead to the same web page.

were the biners in contacts with a crack? ... its easy to have biners loaded in a crack

as to the "backclip"... with trad draws even if backclipped they are usualy free hanging enough to twist till they are not backclipped when the rope move, or just twist the sling around ... especially the skinny dyneema ones

its much more likely that the gate was facing on the side of the fall and the rope unclipped itself that way

for 3 independent failures to happen .... something must have went really wrong ... or you pissed off the climbing gods with insufficient sacrifice of small household pets