Carabiner snapped in a fall

[lena_chita]

Interesting point, but from the description it sounds like the gate of the upper biner was facing right and she was moving left. Unfortunately there is no silver bullet when it comes to that small but omnipresent background risk when trusting your hide to a single piece of gear, especially the non-locking aluminum variety. Just glad she was high on the route!

The gate on the bolt side was indeed facing right. The draw on the ROPE end was facing left. I would have hung the draw with the bolt-side biner facing left, too, because my draws have both top and bottom biners oriented the same way, and because I prefer to have the biner spine to the bolt (it is a little less likely to unclip from the bolt in that position), but my friend hung it this way, her draws had the gates on top and bottom biners facing opposite-- exactly as shown in that picture. And I admit I was not concerned about it, because the biner on the bolt was not touching the rock, so I was not worried about it.

Also, the moves in that section are straight up, not left, not right. I make the move with the 8th draw being squarely in the center of my torso. You do go right after you clip the next draw (the 9th, which is the last one on the route), but the 8th and the 9th draws are straight in a vertical line, one above the other.

Here's a picture I didn't have earlier. Some people have misunderstood my description to mean that I thought that the nose of the 'biner got stuck between the hanger and the bolt. I do not think this is the case at all. There are no scratches on the side of the nose indicating that it was wedged against anything there. However, there are scratches on the outside of the top portion of the draw, which make me believe that, once the biner rotated to position that he markings on the inside suggest, it was caught/wedged against the rock.



Petzl will be looking at the draw, and I am sure they are much better at deduction of this kind than I am.

[old_east_coaster]

Interesting...I'll add this to the fray.
In 1996 I was belaying a climber on Possom Lips, I had hung draws, they were leading.
Leader fell up high, hard to say exactly where, but somewhere up high.
The biner on the bolt end of the draw that caught the fall was pinned, in a different manner than described here on Mercy the Huff.
It was pinned in a way that the biner collapsed in on itself. It didn't break but it was very difficult to clean off of the bolt.
I was happy that the biner bent and did not break. Perhaps we were extremely lucky.

Anyway, that's just my experience, hoping to confirm that I have seen a biner get pinned between the bolt hanger and the bolt head, just in our case it had different results.

[rawhuman]

Freak accident, but I have a pal who did the same thing twice. The culprit: opposed biners on quickdraws!

Basically look at the trashed biner, there is a snag scar a few cm from the nose. The bolt likely snagged the biner here, its not a proper angle where its load-rated, so it probably broke when the fall weight hit.

When gates are opposed on quickdraws and when we climb away from the rope end gate (as well all learn along the way...), the bolt end turns and the gate and nose faces up, always. In this case, gravity, route direction, rock features, fall angle/force, Jupiter not aligned with your lucky star, etc, conspired against you. I didnt believe ever that this was an issue, I used to do it. Then I met a guy who explained this all to me after he broke two draws doing it, I changed my ways, it hasn't happened to me, yet.

Dont oppose gates on a biner and the bolt end will most of the time sit in the nice rated basket part of the biner. Oppose the biners and the bolt end gate will always face up when you climb away from the gate, and sometimes creep close to the biner nose. I'll wait for the Petzl jury (in their catalog the biners face both ways, but no comment on why they do this..) but thats my two cents.

[lena_chita]

Freak accident, but I have a pal who did the same thing twice. The culprit: opposed biners on quickdraws!

Basically look at the trashed biner, there is a snag scar a few cm from the nose. The bolt likely snagged the biner here, its not a proper angle where its load-rated, so it probably broke when the fall weight hit.

When gates are opposed on quickdraws and when we climb away from the rope end gate (as well all learn along the way...), the bolt end turns and the gate and nose faces up, always. In this case, gravity, route direction, rock features, fall angle/force, Jupiter not aligned with your lucky star, etc, conspired against you. I didnt believe ever that this was an issue, I used to do it. Then I met a guy who explained this all to me after he broke two draws doing it, I changed my ways, it hasn't happened to me, yet.

Dont oppose gates on a biner and the bolt end will most of the time sit in the nice rated basket part of the biner. Oppose the biners and the bolt end gate will always face up when you climb away from the gate, and sometimes creep close to the biner nose. I'll wait for the Petzl jury (in their catalog the biners face both ways, but no comment on why they do this..) but thats my two cents.

Interesting.

I am with you in the fact that I prefer my draws with both biners facing the same direction, but I don't think you really can make a blanket rule out of it, because sometimes you don't want the biner rotating so the gate is facing down towards the rock, for example. And also, I can come up with scenarios where direction of travel and orientation of the bolt hanger make it more beneficial to have the top and bottom facing the opposite way.

Petzl guys responded quickly and were very helpful. They think my scenario is very likely, but obviously can't say more based on just the pictures. The biner will go to them for analysis.

[THB]

There were no falls or takes on the rope in the 3 days prior to this fall, so you can’t even say that the rope was stretched out from too many subsequent falls in a short period of time, and was thus less dynamic that optimal. I weigh 105 lb. Somebody else can try and calculate the forces, but in terms of climbing falls, this is as light as it gets.

All in all, yes, I agree with you when you say, "this is as light as it gets"... but I bet you still generated somewhere around 3kN-4kN in force on that biner. It doesn't take much to make the force applied to an anchor (and by anchor in this sense, I don't mean like anchors at the top of a route, I mean any piece in between you and the ground that keeps you off the ground) to jump up to around 2kN pretty quickly. Pretty easy to get up to about 5kN-7kN without much rope out and with a hard catch. Pretty hard to get realistic climber scenarios to generate forces more than about 8kN, however... unless you climb on a static rope, don't have a lot of rope out, have a hard catch, weigh more than the average climber, do everything wrong, etc...

The scenario that you laid out in the pictures in your original post seemed to make sense, and in that case, it doesn't take much (around 3kN would be enough I would think) to snap a carabiner. Much like if the nose of a non-key-lock biner is hung up on the bolt-hanger. The biner gets torqued in either of these 2 scenarios and shit breaks, because like has already been said, that's not how the gear is designed to be used.

Glad you are safe. Hopefully we can all learn a little something about this!

[THB]

Scary. Had the biner ever been dropped from height as far as you know?

Not as far as I know. These draws belong to my friends/partners, who are very experienced climbers and who take good care of their gear and are not in a habit of randomly dropping it from heights (you know them, they happen to own a cabin in the same place you do, I believe). The draws have been purchased about 1.5-2 years ago, but due to their current location and circumstances they do not do a lot of outside climbing, so the draws have seen only a handful of climbing days since they have been purchased.

A friend of mine did a pretty well designed experiment when he was in grad school for his Master's in Mechanical Engineering. He dropped biners from different heights of the engineering building on to the concrete streets below. Some were dropped from quite high (70ft, maybe higher). He then x-rayed them and found no micro-fractures and tested them in a static pull machine and they all (ALL) broke at above 20kN (most biners are rated to around 20kN).

I'm not saying you should go drop all your climbing gear from the top of routes and still trust it. But he pretty firmly believes after his experiment that micro-fractures in biners after they are dropped is a myth.

DISCLAIMER: DON'T GO AROUND DROPPING YOUR CLIMBING SHIT AND STILL TRUSTING IT... ALSO, HE ONLY TESTED ALUMINUM CARABINERS, THIS IS CERTAINLY NOT THE CASE FOR CLIMBING EQUIPMENT THAT IS CAST. IF A PIECE IS CAST, THEN IT IS MUCH MORE BRITTLE AND IT ALMOST CERTAINLY WILL FRACTURE IF DROPPED FROM A HEIGHT.

[DriskellHR]

When I went to high angle rescue school in Colorado they basically said the same thing about aluminum. Won't neasarairly fracture but still not a good idea to drop your shit off the crag.

[ynp1]

I have found about a dozen broken carabiner at the base of el cap and I would say more then half of them have been spirits. I am not sure why that is, but I know if you load carabiner wrong it can easily snap.

I am glad you are okay! Also, all my draws are spirits, so I am not anti petzl or anything.

[THB]

This might be because spirits are used more commonly than other biners... (this is not an accurate example, but it'll get my point across... like if 100 biners are being used in a given day on el cap, maybe 50 of them are spirits, 10 BD biners, 10 wild country biners, 10 trango biners, 10 DMM biners, 10 omega pacific biners)... then this would make sense.

OR... for whatever reason, the spirits just break more frequently than other biners when they are cross-loaded or torqued in some weird way...

I wonder if this had anything to do with why they re-designed the spirits?!

And/or... I wonder if the new re-designed spirits will be any better in this regard.

[dustonian]

Best post ever... it's official.