What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You
One shortcoming of the ACCT standards at the time of the Hawaiian tragedy in 2011 is that they didn’t require geotechnical engineering for critical guy systems. A soils investigation is now required when a critical guy anchor’s capacity relies on soil conditions, but it’s not required for any other structure or in any other instance. There is also currently no guidance within the standard regard - ing who should be deemed qualified to interpret the results of a soils investigation and to design or approve the system. Standard practices used in other construction industries have long required geotechnical or structural engineers to perform that work, a practice often reinforced by regulato - ry requirements. Adhering to the same standards and practices as other industries could have exposed the weakness in the soil conditions and insufficient anchor design that led to ERi’s Hawaiian incident. But that type of engineering was beyond the scale of what the industry was doing at the time. Industry prac - tices then, and to some extent now, were framed primarily by past practices, Stewart pointed out. As the experiential education industry experi - enced a boom in the 1970s and 1980s, it drew on the climbing and utility industries for much of the needed hardware and practices. When ACCT was formed and began writing standards in the 1990s, it drew on this past experience. In 2011, the stan - dards still reflected this earlier culture. “When the 7th edition ACCT standard addressed critical guy line anchors, it said that the failure mode was assumed to be a slow pull out—not a sudden event. Backups weren’t considered neces - sary, and you didn’t have to do geotech,” Domeck noted.
“And looking back, some of those earlier standards were written to allow things to happen just the way that we wanted them to happen, not the way that they should have been happening, and we should have done better.” In hindsight, he added, “we now understand how the rest of the world has been operating and why, and we’re now operating in that manner, too.” ERi currently does more engineering and testing of anchors than the ANSI/ACCT standard requires, in addition to following building standards main - tained by other organizations. It also looks to the Chance Encyclopedia of Anchoring, which offers “a wealth of information,” Stewart said. “They literal - ly wrote the book on anchors.” Domeck and Stewart worry that some in the industry are not keeping up with changes and ad - vances being made outside of the challenge course and aerial adventure world, and that this aspect of the culture keeps the industry from evolving at the same pace as more traditional design/build fields. “Today, in 2024, if you said, ‘Hey, let’s start a ropes course, and no one’s ever done this before, what materials should we use?’ everyone would approach it completely differently,” said Domeck. “We now have access to CNC machines and new forms of testing, and software and resources that didn’t exist 20 or 30 years ago. “Unfortunately, some people still stick with old practices instead of asking, ‘Is this the right thing for this application? Is this the best process?’ And that culture will be really hard to change.”
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