Hi, I'm Brad Chaney
Captain, public information officer for South King Fire and Rescue.
And what we're going to do here is we're going to talk about ladder safety
and how to properly work on hanging our Christmas lights.
Every year, fire departments across the country respond
to numerous calls for people that fell off of a ladder
and suffered some injuries.
A fall from even four feet up can actually be life threatening.
So we want to give you some tips and tricks on how to be successful.
The first thing we're going to look at is we're going to look at making
sure we select the proper ladder for the job.
So I've got this one here.
I'm going to have my partner come help and hold this for me.
We're going to check it for stabilization.
It seems like it's actually pretty good.
And then I'm going to go ahead and climb
up and be mindful that I don't get to the top rungs.
So that's as far as I can go.
And as you can see, it's not really ideal.
I have to kind of reach out in order to be able to access my lights,
and I'm also leaning over the ladder, which is also not safe.
All right.
So that ladder obviously didn't work.
We're going to go over to this much bigger ladder and check this one out.
First thing I want to do before climbing this is
I want to make sure that it's stable.
You can see that it actually rocks back and forth pretty easily.
You know, here in the Pacific Northwest, we have a lot of hills.
It's one of the things that makes it beautiful.
But unfortunately, we have uneven ground.
So we're going to move this around
and see if we can make it a little bit more stable.
There we go. That's much better.
Now that's stable.
It's it's going to be a lot safer for me to climb.
Now that I'm up here, you can see I have a lot more room to work
and be able to access my lights and fix them.
And then also, I'm not leaning out over the ladder
anything that would be unsafe.
So this ladder is definitely the proper height for being
able to work on these lights.
One of the other things that's important
is you noticed I had my partner, Catherine, holding the ladder.
It's great to work in teams of two; ladders can be tricky.
And unfortunately, if you were to be using a ladder by yourself and fall off,
you could suffer an injury that may prevent you from being able to call 911.
So we want to make sure that we always have a partner with us
when working on ladders.