For individuals, organizations, and industries to improve and grow, it helps to learn from serious incidents that occur. That learning, though, can only happen when people are willing to confront what happened honestly and openly and share what they have learned. Otherwise, individuals, organizations, and industries are doomed to repeating the same mistakes over and over.
That was the message that Todd Domeck and Mandy Stewart of ERi delivered during a session at the Association for Challenge Course Technology (ACCT) Annual Conference and Expo last February. Their session described an incident that occurred 13 years ago and exposed some of the industry’s shortcomings, from its culture to its standards and practices.
Some of these shortcomings still exist, Domeck and Stewart told API during an interview in late summer. And that’s worrisome.
“I’m telling you my story because if we don’t start talking about serious incidents openly, they’re just going to keep happening,” Domeck said.
The Genesis of the Story
“On September 21, 2011, my crew was working on the big island of Hawaii just outside of Hilo,” Domeck recalled. “They were testing a zip line that they had brought back up to its original tension. Teddy Calloway was riding the zip line. Curtis Wright was on the zip line tower. When Teddy started to ride the line, both of the guy anchors catastrophically pulled out of the ground, and the tower collapsed, which caused the zip line to lose tension and drop. Teddy hit the rocks on the river below and died. Curt was physically attached to the tower and went down with it, but he survived.”
Amidst this tragedy, Domeck added, “My top three priorities were to take care of the families, to find out what happened, and to deal with the industry backlash that I knew would come.”
That third item is telling. More on it in a moment.
First, Domeck said, “I focused on the family. I called Teddy’s dad, and let him know that his son was dead. That was the hardest phone call I’ve ever made. I flew with Teddy’s body back to Pasco, Washington, and then we focused on taking care of Curt, who had been a longtime friend, and his recovery.”
ERi and several government agencies investigated the incident to discover how and why it happened. Over the course of a few months, they brought in structural engineers, geotechnical engineers, and an ACCT PVM to understand the incident.
Snap Judgments
The backlash that Domeck anticipated happened long before the investigations were completed. “It came faster than I could get to Hilo,” he said. He was called a murderer by the ACCT executive director at the time, and by a few others as well. He was asked to resign from his position on the ACCT board of directors. (He didn’t, and was reelected a few years later.) The immediate assumption was that ERi had been irresponsible, and the industry wanted to disassociate itself from the incident.
“I’m a professional vendor member, and I was following the standards,” Domeck said. “And so it should have been an eye-opening sign to everyone to go, ‘Oh, my gosh, something’s wrong with the standards.’ But it wasn’t. It was the opposite. It was, ‘They did something wrong.’ Their mentality was, ‘It can’t happen to us, we’re smarter and better than other people.’”
The scene from 2011 after guy anchors pulled from the ground, causing the tower to collapse while ERi’s Teddy Calloway was testing the zip line connected to the tower. He died from the fall.
Domeck said that, as far as ERi knew, it had been doing things correctly. It had used seven-foot triple helix anchors with a seven-foot extension, which were rated for a load of more than 30,000 pounds. “In the worst possible soil condition, it should have held,” said Domeck.
Except that the soil condition was worse than almost anyone could have imagined, and worse than anything on the manufacturer’s holding capacity chart for the helical anchors.
The site was built on Pahala ash, the fallout from a long-ago volcanic eruption. This area on the big island of Hawaii is the only place on Earth where it occurs, not much was known about its properties at the time, and it appeared identical to the red dirt common to the area. What scientists and engineers were learning is that Pahala ash has extremely low cohesion compared to other soils, and it gets even lower when saturated—holding as much as 400 percent soil moisture, and when disturbed, its strength may be so low as to be negligible.
Despite ERi’s adherence to the ACCT standard in place at the time, these factors allowed the anchors to rip out of the ground.
What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate
The industry backlash itself showed a tendency to assume the worst after an accident, and a rush to blame someone—in this case, the builder.
The larger issue, both Domeck and Stewart said, is a reluctance to share incident information, and to then act upon it (i.e., changing procedures, practices, and requirements in standards). The industry would greatly benefit from openly discussing incidents and collaborating on ways to reduce them in the future, they believe. And that will require a major change in industry culture.
That culture, they said, has been to assume that “we won’t make the same kind of mistakes other people do,” and continue to do things as they’ve always been done.
“My hope is that we don’t repeat the same type of accidents,” Domeck said. “If we start talking about these things, I think we’ll see less and less repeats of the same type of accidents, both in construction and operations.”
These notes, written by ERi owner Todd Domeck immediately after the accident, show the order of priority for him at the time. While he anticipated the industry backlash, it came a lot quicker than he expected.
Sharing this type of information and creating a culture of safety in the industry, he said, will “affect the way the standards are written, and the way training is conducted.”
The Accident Project
To back up their incident-sharing advocacy and follow the example of other industries, Domeck and Stewart launched The Accident Project (theaccidentproject.com) at this past ACCT conference. The intent is to provide a space for industry members—including operators, trainers, inspectors, engineers, and others, not just builders—to report incidents and share the lessons learned.
“We, along with a lot of other people that we respect in the industry, have been advocating for a voluntary accident reporting mechanism where people can understand how and why accidents happen so we can all collectively do our best to prevent them,” Stewart said.
She pointed out that such a system is common in other industries and activities that involve an element of risk, such as rock climbing and aviation, “where they understand the value of sharing this information.
“The priority in those situations isn’t defending yourself and your actions. The priority is protecting people in the future. And we as an industry have not gotten comfortable enough with sharing to move those efforts forward.
“It’s sad that it’s 2024 and we’re still struggling to make progress on this in our industry,” said Stewart.
Wanted: a project champion. Both Domeck and Stewart regret that they have not been able to get The Accident Project moving forward. They lack the time and resources needed, and are looking for a means to accomplish that.
“We’ve had conversations with a couple of organizations to see if there’s some place that we can find to house it. It needs to be with someone who’s relatively independent, and who really understands how to collect, analyze, and distribute that sort of data,” such as a university, she said.
They also acknowledge that it will take a good deal of effort to change the culture and launch such a program.
“Talking about accidents, sharing information and trying to help each other grow, it makes you vulnerable to some criticism,” Domeck said. “Honestly, I don’t like to share, either. I didn’t want to do this interview. But we all need to talk about incidents, as much as we might not want to.
“And I think that in 2024, people are a little more open to that vulnerability and how they can take that and learn from it. Accidents can happen to you, too. So try and minimize that by learning from other people,” he added.
Learning From OSHA
The aerial adventure industry can learn from other industries as well.
“Years ago we sat in on an OSHA presentation,” Domeck recalled, “and the speaker said, ‘Rule number one, don’t ever go off the ground.’ And we all laughed. But he wasn’t laughing. He continued, ‘Rule number two, if you do go off the ground, don’t fall. And rule number three, if you do fall, don’t hit the ground.’”
What seemed silly at first began to make perfect sense: builders should spend as little time in the air as possible, for safety’s sake, and take appropriate safety precautions when they do get off the ground.
“Those simple little rules completely changed the way we work,” Domeck noted. “We’ve got a product called a Tango Tower. It used to take us a month to build, and we’d be up in lifts much of the time. After that OSHA presentation, I said, ‘We’re going to build this whole thing on the ground from now on.’”
After rethinking the entire construction process, builds went from 30 days to just seven—with only two days of work at height. If you take the time to reconsider how you do things, Domeck said, “you can become safer and make better products. And in this particular case, make more money doing it.”
The Alliance Collaborative
Domeck and ERi have been fans of collaboration for years. Domeck was one of the founders of the Alliance Collaborative, first pulling the group together in 2014 when he “needed some help getting some projects done,” he said. He noted that several of the Alliance members have tried to get ACCT involved in more collaborative projects over the years, often while serving as ACCT board members, without much success.
“We figured that with a smaller, more nimble group, we could do more to help support each other,” he said.
The Alliance members also agreed to operate in ways that exceed the requirements of the ANSI/ACCT standards in some instances. That includes having engineering done in circumstances where it’s not mandated.
When the guy anchors pulled out of the Pahala ash soil, they left a hole like this one. Pahala ash looks similar to normal red dirt but is far less stable; geotechnical engineering could have revealed this weakness.
ACCT: Change Agent?
Both Domeck and Stewart emphasize that they remain strong believers in ACCT. They point to the fact they were allowed to tell their story at the 2024 Conference; they had first proposed a PVM-only session regarding the Hawaiian incident and incident sharing in 2017, but it was rejected. They see their session as a sign the organization is opening up to having difficult conversations, and to changing the culture.
But change can be uncomfortable. Domeck and Stewart note that there was a good deal of nervousness in the industry and in ACCT about the presentation. Some attendees admitted they really didn’t want to hear the message, and attended reluctantly. After they heard the full story, though, these same individuals praised the effort. The duo also point out that ACCT’s new executive director, Melissa Webb, both approved and attended the session, and they are hopeful that they and others will be able to work with Webb to bring some needed changes to the organization.
“What we really need to do now is take action. We need to actually have some sort of mechanism or forum where these conversations can take place,” said Stewart. She suggested that might include a pre- or post-Conference session, if not one during the Conference itself.
Domeck added, “People in ACCT and other groups need to know that when you talk about and report incidents, you’re not going to be demonized, or lose your credentials or insurance. We didn’t lose ours.”
“My hope is with the younger, up-and-coming professionals,” said Stewart. “It is a different world now, and they tend to see the value of being open with these sorts of things more than some of us that may have been around a lot longer.”
What You Don’t Know Can’t 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 regarding 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 regulatory 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 practices then, and to some extent now, were framed primarily by past practices, Stewart pointed out.
As the experiential education industry experienced 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 standards 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 necessary, 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 maintained by other organizations. It also looks to the Chance Encyclopedia of Anchoring, which offers “a wealth of information,” Stewart said. “They literally wrote the book on anchors.”
Domeck and Stewart worry that some in the industry are not keeping up with changes and advances 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.”
