Has anyone here ever broke a daisy/lanyard/pas in a fall?

The title says it all, in the lab with a 120kg or 80kg steel weight in a perfect fall factor two, it can break a dyneema sling, but, 7mm cord (10.6kn 8 to 8)seems to be doing just fine for aid climbers taking FF2 daisy whips.

So, does anyone know of it happening in the real world? I can't find any record of it and neither can chatgpt. My thought is it seems likely that Uiaa guidelines are massively over the real world forces. 

I would be more worried about the impact of such a fall on your body

My recollection is that Metolius did some human subject tests with their PAS a decade or so ago. The falls hurt the human, not the pas. The human body is capable of taking on the energy of falling a few feet. Do the thought experiment of whether you'd be willing to put your hands in your pocket and roll off a picnic table onto a concrete surface; that will give you a rough idea of how far you should contemplate falling on a static tether. Falls much more than a foot or two or three, start breaking the human, carabiners, and webbing.

Which UIAA guideline are you referencing? If this is the sewn-sling strength, that's high because, during fall arrest, the force on the climber is added to the tension in the rope on the belayer side of the top anchor. Further, there is allowance for the relatively large variation is test results for textiles and degradation over time (22 kN rather than the 20 kN for carabiners; I'm going on memory here...). One of the problems with personal tethers is that you can have either strength or energy absorption, but both is hard. For example, a hank of dynamic rope won't pass the ~20 kN tensile test. The dynamic belay lanyard has a static strength requirement of only 15 kN (about the same as a loop of 7mm cord I'd guess?) and 10 kN on the 80 kg drop test. For reference if I remember correctly, the US navy permits 18 kN on pilots during parachute deployment in a full body harness. Also compare with the via ferrata energy absorbers, 12 kN static and 6 kN dynamic.

Fatal Accident - Shock Loaded Anchor Failure (Grand Capucin).

From UK Climbing, 2007. 

WF WF51wrote:

Fatal Accident - Shock Loaded Anchor Failure (Grand Capucin).

From UK Climbing, 2007. 

If you climb in the French alps you'll not be surprised by the failure here, there is a lot of horrific tat around, it very common for bolts to be tied together using a cut up dyneema sling, 6mm cord, webbing, etc, and that shit gets absolutely ruined in no time. Anchor Failure≠PAS failure 

Dave, the biggest over kill I'm referring to is in the UIAA spec, the need for the lanyard to take 3 FF2 falls back to back while also limiting slip. I think these regs are essentially overbearing and limit innovation in the space. Yes textiles degrade with use, thin ropes don't last as long as thick ones, we manage the risk and retire thin ropes early.

that guy named sebwrote:

 Anchor Failure≠PAS failure 

While this is true, the two are not completely unrelated. Obviously the stretchiest PAS in the world won’t save you if your anchor is 3 pebbles resting on a ledge slung with dental floss, but the ability of the PAS to limit peak forces on the anchor in a fall could certainly be the difference between the anchor failing and holding, especially with a marginal anchor. 

Maybe this confirms the opposite like you mentioned. A couple weeks ago I took a couple falls off of hooks onto my lower ladder aid climbing. my petzl evolv adjust caught the falls. this didnt hurt me or the adjust

Jake wanderwrote:

Maybe this confirms the opposite like you mentioned. A couple weeks ago I took a couple falls off of hooks onto my lower ladder aid climbing. my petzl evolv adjust caught the falls. this didnt hurt me or the adjust

Did the Petzl adjust slipped when you fall? 

Hard Sendwrote:

Did the Petzl adjust slipped when you fall? 

if it did, it wasnt a meaningful amount. 

Jake wanderwrote:

if it did, it wasnt a meaningful amount. 

Was it a stock adjust or had you changed out the rope?

I forgot my daisies once on a tune up solo wall once and decided to just jury-rig a daisy by tying a couple overhands into a long sling. I later took a pretty long daisy fall onto it--pretty much as long as possible, 6-8 feet or so. The rope was snug but not loaded at the bottom of the fall-- might have absorbed a little? Definitely grabbed at the rock a little on the way down too--

Anyway, it hurt a lot but didn't break. The overhands were so welded I never could undo them after a couple hours working on them, even with an awl. 

Max Tepferwrote:

Was it a stock adjust or had you changed out the rope?

stock, but heavily used

In case you haven't already found it - this was one of the questions I put out on a thread a few years ago ( mountainproject.com/forum/t… ), cross posted on the rope test lab FB group.

Oddly, the only examples (of incidents resulting from falling onto a lanyard) I found at the time involved failure of the anchor (I believe it was the Grand Capucin incident referenced above), but also failure of the connector (likely in some form of cross loaded/levered/gate open senario). Unfortunately I believe the incidents i'm aware of do not have publically available reports associated with them so the details are pretty fuzzy as they were private communications.

I thought there were examples of partial failure/near misses associated with an aid climbing fall onto a cam buckle adjustable style daisy but don't have a reference.

Failure of webbing seems not uncommon in rec climbing (eg. anchor failures) due to failure of knot/knot slippage (eg. if someone was using a hand tied sling as a lanyard), and succeptability to enviromental degredation (eg. UV, abrasion, chemical etc) so I was surprised I couldn't find an example of a webbing based lanyard failing.

"My thought is it seems likely that Uiaa guidelines are massively over the real world forces."

I think how that is one achieves a reasonable measure of safety in engineering. I would have thought with the general move towards dynamic rope based lanyards (Eg. UIAA-109) at least in free climbing the apparently very small risk of lanyard failures is likely to continue to reduce.

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Addendum: example of lanyard failure (not a fall senario).

Reference: https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/foia/upload/GRTE_GaryFalk_Fatality_Incident-Report_NP16114877.pdf pp27

"In conclusion, the evidence suggests that Falk was tethered to the anchor with a 98 inch section of blue 9/16 tubular webbing that was tied in a loop with a water knot, that one of the tails on the water knot was of inadequate length, that the tail slipped through the knot causing it to fail while Falk was weighting the lanyard, and that this caused Falk to fall from the rappel stance resulting in his death."

Note: this appears to be less of a failure due to lanyard fall rather a failure due to failure of the 'water knot'.

I did manage to find this

http://www.supertopo.com/climbers-forum/1412086/Best-adjustable-daisy-Quick-Fix-Yates-or-Easy-Daisy

Roy broke a Yates daisy

 Cam buckle daisies are known to be very weak(and very static), if new would be failing at about 7.5kn(hownot2), if used, who knows, webbing is known to degrade in strength pretty quickly. 

http://www.supertopo.com/climbers-forum/273295/Share-your-nylon-climbing-gear-failures-here

PTPP broke a metolius webbing webbing daisy that was apparently long past it's retirement date as well as a Yates that was heavily worn. 

Apparently someone also lost a bag on NA wall when the daisy connecting to the wall broke but no further details are available and if connected improperly, pocketed daisies are know to fail as low as 2kn new in a cross pocket clip(BD). 

Unfortunately we don't know what forces were involved in these forces but it would appear that real world daisy falls put less than 10kn on an anchor, potentially as high as around 7kn but most likely lower. 

Jake wanderwrote:

Maybe this confirms the opposite like you mentioned. A couple weeks ago I took a couple falls off of hooks onto my lower ladder aid climbing. my petzl evolv adjust caught the falls. this didnt hurt me or the adjust

I have also had this experience, with seemingly the same outcome.

How Not 2 has also done some test drops with various personal anchors and ropes with them that might be worth watching.

dave custerwrote:

My recollection is that Metolius did some human subject tests with their PAS a decade or so ago. The falls hurt the human, not the pas. The human body is capable of taking on the energy of falling a few feet. Do the thought experiment of whether you'd be willing to put your hands in your pocket and roll off a picnic table onto a concrete surface; that will give you a rough idea of how far you should contemplate falling on a static tether. Falls much more than a foot or two or three, start breaking the human, carabiners, and webbing.

Are there actual instances of severe injury or death due to such force generated in a fall during climbing? I couldn't find any, though I may have searched poorly. Did come across instances of PAS or anchor sling failure.

My only relevant experience was falling about 5 feet  clipped directly via sit harness to a 3 foot sling of 6mm accessory cord with no memorable adverse effect on myself or the sling. Edit: I weighed around 60 kg. Also this was about 1970 so the cord might have had more dynamic specs than modern accessory cord.

I must admit BITD I was ignorant of the likelihood of sling failure and when by myself would sometimes clip directly to protection via slings and unclip again from above. Obviously would not do that now. For context often a fall would have been terminal without that protection.

that guy named sebwrote:

...the biggest over kill I'm referring to is in the UIAA spec, the need for the lanyard to take 3 FF2 falls back to back while also limiting slip. I think these regs are essentially overbearing and limit innovation in the space. Yes textiles degrade with use, thin ropes don't last as long as thick ones, we manage the risk and retire thin ropes early.

I think the slip and the falls are separate tests, so there can be an arbitrary amount of slippage during the fall test, but less than 50 mm under a (semi)static 2 kN load. For me, the point of having a lanyard is that it doesn't slip or stretch much under body weight, so the 50 mm slip under a 2 kN load seems reasonable--not too different from the static elongation for dynamic ropes. The multiple falls is in line with dynamic ropes. 

As someone in one of the super topo referenced posts notes, the lanyard is a lot like a harness and a rope--there is (the possibility of) no redundancy. I don't find it surprising that the standard fits well with the metrics of the harness and dynamic rope standards. Yes, in a way both standard are "overkill" but, in the bigger scheme of things, ropes and harnesses don't fail (when used, inspected, maintained, stored, retired correctly...) much because the threshold set by the standards is high.

A wonky thought on overtesting on the lanyard droptest: In the day, the 80 kg steel mass was chosen because it performed similarly to a 100 kg climber in a high fall factor ~5 meter drop. As a back of the envelope approximation, if person can handily absorb the energy from a meter of fall, the 80 kg mass is not too surprising, 4/5 the mass::4/5 the "effective fall distance." For the shorter fall distance of lanyards though this ratio is not the same. It might be the case that a smaller mass would be appropriate for the lanyard droptest.

Joy Bastet wrote:

there isn't a fall in the world that will break a dyneema sling in good condition. always a weakness is the failure point (knot, gear, sharp edge, chemical contamination, etc..

An interesting puzzle. I think it depends on the length of the sling. If a climber breaks the sling, it will hurt. As badly as falling to the ground? 

Interesting question, we need the mythbusters to rig up a 80kg pig carcass with a harness + sling(s) and do some Factor 2 falls onto an anchor.

To any youtubers- do iiiiit