Safety standards are being examined after a teenage window cleaner survived a four-storey fall from an Auckland building yesterday.
Eighteen year-old Louisa Kuypers was cleaning windows at the Lion Nathan Building in Newmarket yesterday afternoon when she fell 30 metres from the roof of the building.
She was admitted to Auckland Hospital with severe injuries and is now in stable condition.
The accident is the third industrial rope accident in eight months and has prompted the industry to ask whether safety standards are being followed well enough.
A Wellington window washer fell from the fifth floor of a building last June and an abseiling performance artist plunged 14 metres down a wall in Auckland's Aotea Square in December.
The industry needs to sharpen up its act, ONE News heard from Thomas Croft, an industrial rope expert.
"We're happy because nobody's died but it's getting a little bit close at the moment. Three in a short time period, it's just not good enough," he said.
Newmarket office workers say Kuypers had just started scaling the top of the Lion Breweries building when she dropped, along with a metal anchor used to attach herself to the roof.
Industry standards require anyone doing this work to use two anchors or two lines - one as a backup in case the first fails - and the farthest a person should fall is 60 centimetres.
"For somebody to fall that far in a compliant system means that both anchors would have had to fail, which is highly unlikely," said Croft.
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