Left hanging Canadian Occupational Safety magazine
For anyone walking along King Street East in Toronto, seeing a window washer working on the upper floors of the famed King Edward Hotel is nothing new. It happens all the time -- except for this time. This time, a worker cleaning a window on the eighth floor of the hotel somehow slipped out of his safety harness and was left clinging to a dangling rope and struggling to keep his balance on the window's ledge. He was eventually rescued by firefighters who had to break the window to reach him.
No explanation was given as to how he slipped out of the harness. After all, who would want to explain their role in such a mishap? But John Fuke, product manager with Can-Sling DBI in Oakville, Ont. is willing to offer one possibility of what might have happened based on photographs of the incident that appeared in several Toronto newspapers.
'My understanding,' Fuke says, 'and you must remember that we can't verify this - is that he got out of his harness so that he could better clean the window.'