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Greg Barnes
climber
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Topic Author's Original Post - Mar 17, 2015 - 12:33pm PT
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I'm starting a new thread about Scott Sederstrom's accident, so we can keep the condolences in the original thread and discussions on the bolt failure here. The original thread is http://www.supertopo.com/climbers-forum/2594185/accident-in-owens-gorge
I just heard from Dan McDevitt, who investigated and replaced the broken bolt this morning with Marty Lewis.
The broken bolt was not a 3/8" 5-piece as everyone had been assuming. It was a 5/16" buttonhead which had snapped about 1/2" into the hole, and apparently it had cracked completely before the accident. When buttonheads are partially cracked, when they snap on removal and you look at the broken bolt, you can see a "rusty face" of the break plus a "clean new break" section of metal. This shows how much cracked a while back, vs what cracked during removal. Once Dan figured out what to look for, he managed to find the head of the bolt, and the entire face of the cracked bolt was rusted. This indicates that the bolt was probably broken completely through before the accident, and probably barely strong enough to hold the hanger on the wall, let alone a climber.
Dan said there were several moved bolts and old bolt holes higher on the route, and some opportunities for gear placements, so the best guess is that the 5/16" buttonhead was placed on lead, the route was probably led with fewer bolts than it has now, and it was re-engineered after the lead. They probably could not remove the 5/16". Most likely they did not even try - 5/16" buttonheads are typically very strong, and infamously difficult to remove.
Dan is driving down to town and will be sending close-up photos of the bolt, and I will post those as soon as I get them.
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FRUMY
Trad climber
Bishop,CA
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Mar 17, 2015 - 12:38pm PT
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Greg, thanks for the information & for placing it on it's own thread.
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limpingcrab
Trad climber
the middle of CA
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Mar 17, 2015 - 12:39pm PT
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So did it look like the original report from R&I was accurate? Using a stick clip to move one quickdraw from one bolt to the next as he went up? Wouldn't that make any fall a factor 2? Not that it would matter if the bolt was already cracked all the way through. I didn't even realize this was something that people did...
Scott Sederstrom, 44, fell to his death on Friday, March 13 when a bolt failed on Life in Electric Larvae Land (5.10b) at Silent Pillar Wall, Owen’s River Gorge, outside of Bishop, California.
When Sederstrom did not return that evening, his fiancé drove to the lower gorge parking lot. She found his van and dog there. Inyo Country Search and Rescue began an organized search in the morning.
About an hour into the search, a family friend of Sedestrom’s found his body in the gorge. Sederstrom was on the ground, with an eight-foot loop of slack between the tie-in point on his harness and GriGri attached to his belay loop. A quickdraw was on the rope within the loop, and a bolt hanger, missing its bolt, was on the other end of the draw.
Sederstrom had a stick-clip attached to his harness. The evidence suggests that he was going bolt to bolt—unclipping the one below as he went—when the third bolt of the climb failed.
Sederstrom fell 25 to 30 feet to the ground, suffering trauma to his head. He was not wearing a helmet.
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steelmnkey
climber
Vision man...ya gotta have vision...
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Mar 17, 2015 - 12:41pm PT
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Kinda scary since there's no way to inspect something like that.
If they do crack, is that generally an outcome of being pounded into the hole or just something that might happen after maybe having been fallen on a bunch?
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apogee
climber
Technically expert, safe belayer, can lead if easy
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Mar 17, 2015 - 12:43pm PT
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Great thread idea. Thanks for starting it.
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Rankin
Social climber
Greensboro, North Carolina
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Mar 17, 2015 - 12:55pm PT
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Boy this really sucks. That bolt was almost 25 years old. Thx for all of the info Marty, Dan, Greg.
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mhay
climber
Bishop, CA
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Mar 17, 2015 - 01:00pm PT
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One thing the R&I article did not mention is that he also had a daisy and locker girthed to his harness. One possible description of what he was doing is that he would feed slack into his rope loop, stick-clip the loop of rope with quickdraw to the next bolt, jigger himself up on the 2:1 with the gri-gri. Once at the bolt he would daisy into the bolt, clear the rope out of the draw, and repeat. He was definitely not using standard rope-solo technique, and was relying on single bolts most of the time.
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Matt's
climber
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Mar 17, 2015 - 01:03pm PT
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thanks for the clarification-- so he was essentially going bolt-to-bolt, with the eventual goal of setting up a fixed line from the top?
I guess I'm trying to understand whether his system involved the use of an anchor or not.
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mhay
climber
Bishop, CA
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Mar 17, 2015 - 01:04pm PT
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with the eventual goal of setting up a fixed line from the top?
That would be one explanation, and the one I happen to like the most, but of course it's just speculation.
EDIT: There was no bottom anchor.
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Greg Barnes
climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 17, 2015 - 01:09pm PT
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I remember seeing someone do exactly that at Smith without any backup system, stick clip his way up a 5.13 with a long stick-clip.
It's hard to say why buttonheads crack. Some folks have told me about "bad batches" of 1/4" (and maybe 5/16"?) that cracked easily. Maybe some of those folks will chime in with specifics from the late '80s/'90s? Think I heard that from Grant Hiskes, Kris Solem, and some others? Hope someone who knows will chime in.
Right now I'm trying to come up with a priority list of routes which are all (or mostly) 5/16" buttonheads that need to be replaced, so if anyone wants to add to the list please email me.
Actually, on second thought, how about I just start the list here. Some of the routes are pretty darn popular, and those will be top of the list. I know some climbing areas have loads. These are just a few off the top of my head:
Tuolumne -
East Cottage Dome -
Orange Plasma
Disintegration aka The Bulge
other(s)?
Fairview Dome -
Great Pumpkin, the only bolt at the pitch 1 anchor
Medlicott Dome -
Royal Flush (also has Leepers on the 5/16" buttonheads)
I think there are a lot at Courtright?
Also, 5/16" buttonheads were often added to old 1/4" anchors as the "one new bolt", and during replacement no one messed with the 5/16" - often replacing only one of the 1/4" with a stainless 3/8", then leaving the 5/16" (and removing & patching the other 1/4"). Think there might be an anchor or two like that on Stoner's Highway among others.
I think Roger Brown came up with a way to replace 5/16" buttonheads with 3/8" bolts without getting the hand drill stuck. I've always had problems and just moved to 1/2" or 12mm bolts (where there's enough rock that the bit doesn't easily get stuck, I found that it's easier to hand drill a slightly bigger bolt than to battle the stuck bit endlessly). But I rarely messed with 5/16" buttonheads after learning just how hard it is to remove them.
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Mar 17, 2015 - 01:10pm PT
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Split shaft compression bolts are time bombs and should not be used as consequential anchors period even as big as 3/8".
Tortured metal makes for poor anchors and these things fail all the time so stop using them folks because it is a design flaw and not the result of any particular batch! They corrode and fail at the split because the metal has been stressed twice at that place and is under tension once the bolt is driven in.
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Greg Barnes
climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 17, 2015 - 01:11pm PT
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Steve, do you know of 3/8" split-shaft failures?
There are some spots where those were somewhat popular. I think Greg Vernon was using those for replacement at the Needles (often with titanium hangers!)...
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Mar 17, 2015 - 01:24pm PT
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Greg- When one of your guys tries to get the nut off of a 3/8" split shaft and the entire bolt shears off, I would count that as a failure. Putting a new hanger on an old split shaft bolt even if it doesn't shear of during the swap out is also a poor idea down the road.
Ed Leeper himself wrote an article proclaiming this type of anchor to be unsuitable for long term climbing applications even in the 3/8" size.
I think that you would hear about more failures if there were more of the 3/8" size out in service. I placed hundreds of them on stance thinking that I was doing the right thing for the long haul and was deeply disappointed to find out otherwise when I cleaned an unnecessary one on El Cap with two or three blows and discovered that most of the area across the top split was clearly corroded.
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franky
Trad climber
Bishop, CA
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Mar 17, 2015 - 01:25pm PT
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Thanks for the update Greg,
I can confirm that the details about the setup of the climbing gear posted on Rock and Ice are essentially correct. I am a member of Inyo SAR and investigated the scene of the incident with other very experienced members of the team.
his setup was-
tie-in at end of rope -> 8 feet of slack with a quickdraw and bolt hanger clipped to it -> grigri clipped to belay loop -> flaked rest of rope.
basically, he had a loop of rope between a tie in and a grigri, quite likely used as a 2:1 setup to pull himself up to the bolt he had stick clipped (My opinion). he had a stick clip holstered through a gear loop on his harness.
There was no upward pull anchor, and no rope running through the first two bolts which had quickdraws on them.
He had a minitraxion on his pack, but not on his harness. It seems very likely he was attempting to setup a fixed line to top rope solo (again, my opinion).
The way I see it, there are three things that went wrong in this incident:
1. Bolt failed
2. The aid climbing system he quite likely used was only into one bolt at a time (supported by the evidence, but impossible to know 100% for sure)
3. No helmet, who knows if it would have helped, but I can confirm that the the main injury was in an area that would have been covered by a helmet
The slight delay in getting this information out was to make sure the people who needed to know details got them before everyone else. We tried our best to make sure that was the case. We also wanted to coordinate with Greg and the ASCA to find out the condition of the failed bolt. There was no way to tell if the bolt had failed under bodyweight or by a short high-factor fall onto his ascending system. It now seems likely that the bolt could have failed under bodyweight.
-Frank Klein
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Matt's
climber
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Mar 17, 2015 - 01:36pm PT
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thanks for all the info-- sounds like a really freak accident! so sad...
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Greg Barnes
climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 17, 2015 - 01:38pm PT
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Just got these photos from Dan:
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Roger Brown
climber
Oceano, California
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Mar 17, 2015 - 01:45pm PT
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Thank you Greg for your post. Button heads scare me. I have found so many broken in the hole. Found one last season that broke when I just stepped on the hanger. I suspect that many of the broken ones are broke, or probably just cracked, during the hammering in. I think that Trad climbers really, as a whole, don't fall that much and that many of those damaged bolts out there have never been fallen on. When the 1/4" bolts started getting harder to find I started replacing 5/16" button heads in The Valley. Most are bomber but some pop right out. I have not yet found a broken 5/16" but I have only replaced one hard 5.13 sport route and all the 5/16" button heads were way bomber. Hangers were stamped DB.
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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Mar 17, 2015 - 01:45pm PT
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In response to the above query,
In about 1994 at Church Dome I led some steep sport rig on The Rectory, The Heretic maybe. On the way up I clipped the bolts. Lowering I cleaned the draws. The face is a tad beyond vertical so I'd kick away and grab the draw on the rebound. To my surprise one of the 3/8" buttonheads broke off when I grabbed the draw.
On inspection the break was right at the point where the shaft begins to split, there was no rust so I think it actually broke when I pulled out on it.
I've seen the fellow who set this route place other of the same bolts. He uses a big heavy hammer. My guess is that the holes are drilled straight making a lot of force needed to drive in the bolt. Holes for buttonheads need to be tapered for the first third or so by rocking the drill around. My guess is that repeated heavy blows began the process of work hardening.
Re "work hardening:"
Although the first few deformations imposed on metal by such treatment weaken it, its strength is increased by continued deformations.
Encyc. Brittanica.
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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Mar 17, 2015 - 01:52pm PT
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Interesting to see the rock spalled away around the hole. That almost certainty happened when the bolt was placed, because the mouth of the hole was not properly tapered.
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