'But I could have pulled him over as well.'įortunately, both Willingham and his partner survived the incident without injury - and vowed not to take any more unnecessary chances.įor many people, the sight of a window washer, dangling from skyscrapers like some sort of urban mountaineer, is a bit unnerving. 'When you're hanging there, you think the extra weight is going to help,' Willingham says. He realized later that this was precisely the wrong thing to say. He shouted for his coworker to sit on the beam while he inched himself downward. In an instant, he decided to rappel down to the ground and hope the beam didn't come rolling off the roof after him.

Willingham couldn't hold onto the window molding much longer, and the beam would likely fall if he tried to climb back up. He yelled for his partner, who called back frantically that one of the legs on the beam had broken and he was unable to right it. It was an automatic reaction, like being able to lift a car in an emergency situation. 'I reached out and grabbed the window molding. And that's when the trouble began: 'I was working on the fifth floor when, all of a sudden, I felt myself fall,' Willingham recalls.

With his partner guarding the beam, Willingham and his boatswain's chair went over the side of the building. Instead of securing his boatswain's chair at two separate locations as required by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Willingham attached it to a single seven-foot counterbalanced beam that he and a coworker had hauled to the top of the roof. The building owner had failed to put in roof anchors on the second half of the building. But one day Willingham decided to cut a few corners. With that in mind, window cleaners usually handle their equipment with the same single-minded intensity as skydivers. Like most window cleaners, he knew an interesting tidbit about physics: A person falling from a five-story building hits the ground just as hard as a person falling from an airplane without a parachute. But when Jim Willingham dangled helplessly above the ground, it seemed plenty far enough. A five-story building doesn't sound too daunting, does it? Even someone with a major fear of heights could enjoy the view from there.

Skyscraper window cleaner