I like climbing truss

There is a myth or unwritten rule that climbing truss or walking on truss is okay. “Of course it’s designed to be walked on because look at all those lovely tubes, just perfect to scramble up and it is way easier than those rock faces I used to climb. “

But seriously, as a manufacture this is a simple statement to be made.

“Truss is not designed to be either climbed or walked on”

It’s categoric and any professional manufacturer should say the same thing. A truss is designed to take either vertical load, if acting as a truss, or axial load, if acting as a tower. What it is not designed to take are all the different loads associated with a person falling over the side with a lanyard clipped to inappropriate parts of the truss and all its resultant forces whilst loaded with lighting, PA and other funky stuff. The result may be that the truss fails, and you end up injured, or worse, along with damaging a lot of very expensive equipment.

“But how do I focus that one light quickly that’s up there?” I hear you cry. Well, the answer is use proper access equipment. There is a very long list of methods of doing this before you should consider climbing on truss and you would have to prove to the magistrate in great detail why it was absolutely impossible for you to use any variety of access equipment before climbing was your only real option.

“Wait! You said you cannot climb truss and now you’re talking about it being the last in a long line of options.” This final resort comes with a big proviso. That is that a structural engineer has calculated all the forces within the structure constructed to determine if the structure can take a person falling. This is the responsibility of the user and not the manufacturer!

So why can’t manufacturers design trusses that people can walk along? The short answer is they do. Catwalk and T2. Catwalk trusses usually negate the need for any fall arrest PPE and they already exist. T2 is a truss that allows for the forces generated by an arrested fall on the fully loaded truss.

So, if you are climbing truss then you are doing so entirely at your own risk and you must accept responsibility for the consequences.