Engineer Caleb Eiriksson from Fort Walton Beach (FL) Truck 6 sent in these photos of some recent emergency roof bail outs he and the rest of C watch trained on. The idea here is simple, if you are on a roof and cut off from your means of egress and had to get off the roof in a hurry, how would you do it? Obviously we hope to never find ourselves in this situation, but it’s something worth considering. Even if any of these techniques are not something you’d be comfortable with, you should at least have a plan of how you plan on getting off a roof in a hurry without a ladder. It’s important to point out that in these photos, they were doing a simple body wrap with the escape rope simulating that no harness or other personal escape system was available to the trapped member.

The first method pictured is a NY roof hook and a rope bag with a carabineer attached. You could pull a ridge vent and exposing the decking/trusses, tongue-and-groove boards or make a purchase point in the plywood. Next, you insert the 45 degree angle of the hook as an anchor. Then place the carabineer over the working end of the roof hook. Finally, a half hitch is placed towards the middle of the hook. The half hitch will keep the hook pulled down towards the roof decking during the decent.

The next method utilizes a roof ladder. If you had a roof ladder with the hooks deployed over the ridge, simply pull out your rope, wrap around a rung and hook the carabineer back on itself. Of course if the roof ladder was long enough, you could just lower it over the side and climb down the ladder. Let’s not over think this…

Another option uses the halligan. Simply tie a figure eight on a bight or use a carabineer. Slide your figure eight on a bight or carabineer over one of the side of the fork. Next, run the rope around the pike and back on its self. Now place a half hitch towards the middle or lower portion of the shaft towards the shoulder. Once the rope is secured to the tool, drive the halligan into the roof .

You could simplify it even further and just tie a clove hitch around the shaft of the halligan just above the shoulder of the forks.

Caleb and the crew wanted to point out they didn’t come up with these techniques, they just wanted to share their photos and highlight the training they did. There are an almost endless amount of ways to quickly egress from a roof if the situation ever arises. Take the opportunity to discuss it with your crew and come up with your company’s plan. If nothing else, take the time to talk about how you would prevent ever having to egress from the roof. A special thanks to Caleb, FF Corrigan, FF Dowd, Engineer Kempf, Captain Morgan and FF Shalduha for sharing the photos.

***The safety police just called and wanted us to remind you to always use a belay when training, the belay was not shown in these photos to simplify the visual.