Recently I attended the Society of Professional Rope Access Technicians (SPRAT) Annual Conference in Cancun, Mexico, and brought home updates on some pretty important changes to SPRAT certification requirements that will be posted to www.SPRAT.org and go into effect April 1, 2019. A sampling of some of the changes are below. Even if industrial rope…
(Hint: It’s not all about rope access!) In 2017 Vertical Access was retained by the City of Ithaca to perform a condition assessment of twelve hillside burial vaults located within the Ithaca City Cemetery in Ithaca, New York. Early this year the City of Ithaca voted to bond money toward the repair some of the…
Mike Russell, EIT, recently trained and was certified to the Society of Professional Rope Access Technicians (SPRAT) Level III Supervisor. According to SPRAT’s Safe Practices for Rope Access Work, all site work must be performed under the supervision of a Level III Supervisor. Level III Supervisors are responsible for the overall rope access operations on…
The biggest obstacle to utilizing UAVs for building documentation has been the prohibition on flying within restricted airspace surrounding airports. Since 2016, authorization to operate in this airspace has depended on case-by-case review by the Federal Aviation Administration with a typical lead time of at least 90 days. By 2018, the backlog for reviewing airspace…
Test your knowledge of historic and iconic buildings in the U.S. (and beyond!) in this series of “guess the building” blog posts. Series No. 13: This church boasts a wealth of sculptural ornament, including dozens of life-sized saints and historical figures, as well as smaller details such as these depictions of tradespeople. The shield is a…
The last week of September, Vertical Access attended the hottest conference in preservation: APT International’s 50th anniversary celebration happening in Buffalo and the Niagara Region of Canada. Fifty years ago, a group of preservation and conservation professionals from both the United States and Canada came together in New Richmond, Quebec to form a new organization…
Photogrammetry is the practice of extrapolating spatial relationships from photographic imagery. While the concept of photogrammetry is centuries old, today’s powerful software quickly generates a 3-dimensional point cloud of any scene or object captured with a half dozen or up to several hundred overlapping digital photographs. Two recent projects illustrate very different applications for this…
Test your knowledge of historic and iconic buildings in the U.S. (and beyond!) in this series of “guess the building” blog posts. Series No. 12: This monumental cathedral – one of the largest churches in the world – has been under construction since 1892. Many delightful details can be found in its stone sculpture, along with a…
Vertical Access recently conducted an in-house industrial rope access training course in preparation for third-party certification or recertification by the Society of Professional Rope Access Technicians (SPRAT). As a Level III Rope Access Supervisor with over 17 years experience in the construction industry and a Vertical Access employee since 2011, I took on the role of…
Test your knowledge of historic and iconic buildings in the U.S. (and beyond!) in this series of “guess the building” blog posts. Series No. 11: The clues to this building’s use are in its marble and terra cotta ornament. It was designed by the firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, and completed in 1930. Where…
