Window Cleaning News

Chicago firefighters rescued a window washer from outside the 26th floor of a Gold Coast high-rise this afternoon. The worker was dangling from a rope and was brought to the roof of the building at 300 E. Ohio St. by firefighters at about 4 p.m., said Chicago Fire Department spokesman Quention Curtis. He suffered minor injuries and will likely be taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

Window Washer Rescued From High-Rise Hotel - CHICAGO. Firefighters rescued a window washer from a scaffold 26 floors above a Streeterville area high-rise Tuesday afternoon. The incident happened at the Doubletree Hotel Chicago at 300 E. Ohio St. about 4 p.m. The scaffold was on the 26th floor of the building, according to Fire Media Affairs Director Larry Langford. The call was for "a window washer in some form of distress," Langford said. The man was ultimately brought down from the scaffold to an ambulance and taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in fair condition, fire officials said.

Norwich police hunt bogus window cleaner: Police hunting a bogus window cleaner who has targeted five elderly people in south Norwich in just four weeks today reassured residents they have stepped up patrols in the area to catch the criminal. Police are also speaking to elderly residents in sheltered housing and those who live in their own homes offering advice and reassurance. The con-artist has targeted sheltered housing in the Lakenham and Tuckswood area of the city, gaining entry through unlocked doors and has stolen handbags and purses. Police believe the unknown man is taking advantage of the warmer weather which means residents tend to leave their windows and doors unlocked.
Sergeant David Jerman, from the Lakenham and Tuckswood Safer Neighbourhood Team (SNT), said “We are actively holding talks with the elderly and also letter dropping with packs of advice.
“Officers will also be visiting local hairdressers and doctors' surgeries where they will leave packs for residents to have access to. “Our team feel it is vitally important to liaise with residents who are of a vulnerable nature so we can find the person/s responsible for these despicable crimes. “Bogus callers and rogue traders often prey on residents such as this, providing plausible cover stories. “We would ask anyone who has been approached by people touting for business as a window cleaner to get in touch with Norfolk Constabulary.”
Lakenham city councillor Keith Driver backed police plans to step up patrols. He said: “That's good news and I would also urge elderly people to be more on guard. The crime rate in Lakenham has gone down, and it's now one of the best places to live in Norwich.” As reported, on Sunday, April 18, an 87-year-old woman at the Norwich City Council-run sheltered housing scheme in Rowland Court, off Queens Road, and a 78-year-old woman at Corton Road, off Bracondale, were both targeted. If you have any information on burglaries in your area contact Norfolk Constabulary on 0845 456 4567, 999 in an emergency, or Crimestoppers on 0800 555111. For more information about local policing visit www.norfolk.police.uk.



Small businesses are the beating heart of our economy - but under Labour thousands of them have been left struggling for survival. A disastrous mix of the recession, rocketing business rates and bailed-out banks refusing to lend cash have forced many owners of small businesses under.
The Federation of Small Businesses say 68 per cent of small firms are still operating below capacity. And a whopping 65 per cent of bosses believe the business climate will either deteriorate or fail to improve over the next 12 months.
MARK McCLURE, 47, has had to lay off one worker and halve the hours of another. Mark, who has runs OsmoWash in Hamble, Hants, for three years, said: I blame Gordon Brown and the Labour Party for the way they have handled things. Under them the price of petrol has rocketed, banks have stopped lending money and my pension has been destroyed. I can't afford for things to get any worse. The recession and credit crunch has had a dramatic effect on our customers - and that in turn has had a massive effect on us. Home owners and businesses are short of money.
Window cleaning is one of the first services they cut. Nobody has been untouched by this. We clean houses that are worth anything from £100,000 up to several million pounds - and all home owners say the economy is in a real mess. My company has a good reputation and people like what we do but they can't afford to pay us. I'm having to work twice as hard just to replace customers that are leaving. A 70-hour week is now normal. I employ one full-time worker and seven part- timers - but I've had to lay off one worker and halve the hours of another employee.
I've also scrapped plans to buy another van and recruit two workers. I hope David Cameron - who I will vote for - has the answers to all our troubles and can turn things around.

Tributes to father (pictured) who died in bar tragedy - Emotional tributes have been paid to a father who died aged 43 after collapsing in a town centre bar. Window cleaner Philip Cotham, known as Pip, died in hospital after he was taken ill in the Breeze Bar in St Helens town centre at around 2am on Sunday, April 18. The cause of death is not known, but there are not believed to be any suspicious circumstances. Friends have been stunned and say he was “fit as a fiddle”. His heartbroken father, also named Philip, had been holidaying in Tenerife, when he was told the news but had to wait four days before he was able to return home because of the ash cloud chaos.
Pip, described as a familiar, cheery face across St Helens, lived on the Hard Lane estate and had been a window cleaner for more than ten years. He wasn’t married, but had a daughter Kirsty, aged 16, and two sons Carl, aged 19, and 12-year-old Kieron. He also had stepchildren Claire, 23, and Craig, 20.
His devastated brother Alan, 47, said the family can’t believe what’s happened. He told the Star: “It’s such a shock. He was such a popular figure round town, always with a laugh and smile on his face. “He wasn’t a wallflower and was always out and about. “At the moment, we’re not sure exactly what happened, but he was as fit as a fiddle. “He was up and down ladders and carrying them everywhere. “All we know is that he was in the beer garden talking to a friend and just collapsed. The bouncers came to help and paramedics tried for 25 minutes to resuscitate him.”
Pip also leaves two other brothers Dave, 45, and Robert, 19 and two sisters Elaine and Ann, who are both aged 41. His funeral is due to take place at St Thomas’s Church on Westfield Street on Friday, April 30, followed by a get together at the Rockware Club on Shaw Street.

Christopher Pickard pleaded guilty to supplying ketamine – a hallucinogenic anaesthetic – to Miss Kaye during an impromptu party at his home on April 17 last year. He was jailed at Bradford Crown Court yesterday by Recorder Edward Bindloss who said Pickard had “a relatively low level of culpability” in Miss Kaye’s death. Prosecutor John Harrison said Miss Kaye called at Pickard’s home, at Halifax Road, Ambler Thorn, Queensbury, at about 1.45am after a girls’ night out. Miss Kaye, of Mickledore Ridge, Horton Bank Top, Bradford, had been drinking heavily, the court heard. Pickard, a window cleaner, now of Thirkleby Royd, Clayton, Bradford, had Ketamine available in his kitchen.

A new window-cleaning company has opened in South Charleston. Debbie Kelly and her son, Joe Kelly, have opened a Fish Window Cleaning franchise at 203 D St. The franchise cleans windows on residential and commercial buildings. Debbie had been director of human resources for a Charleston hotel. Joe previously worked in the mining industry. The Kellys have the first Fish Window Cleaning franchise in West Virginia. Fish Window Cleaning has more than 220 locations in the United States.

Administrative and System-wide Support: The proposed budget reduces/eliminates contracts (vehicles, HVAC, window cleaning, fax/typewriter maintenance); reduces staff development and training; reduces programming support; reduces facilities and maintenance system-wide; and consolidates administrative support activities. Up to 31 positions are expected to be eliminated.

If you have a desire to shake your head from left to right multiple times without any rhyme or reason, "Dirty Jobs" is probably the show for you. Host Mike Rowe has developed a reputation for going into any circumstance just to showcase how some everyday individuals make a living, and often the entertainment value and gross out factor are high enough to leave an impression beyond every episode. The Discovery Channel recently released Season 4 in a five DVD set which can be found at Discoverytore.com. Rowe winds up in Hawaii at one point with a company named Worldwide Window Cleaning. He positions himself in a boson´s chair and spends some time cleaning windows about 40 stories above downtown Honolulu.

A prolific burglar has been spared jail after helping police solve 76 crimes. Lee Webster, 28, of Washington Close, Paignton, was given a two-year community order and order to carry out 100 hours of unpaid work after he admitted two burglaries in Barnstaple and asked for 76 other offences to be taken into account at Exeter Crown Court. He was also electronically tagged for three months under a daily curfew from 8pm to 7am. Judge Graham Cottle warned him he faced a "huge sentence" in prison if he landed in trouble again. Webster broke into a window- cleaning firm and a canine- grooming company in Barnstaple in August last year. Tools and some cash were stolen and police patrolling with sniffer dogs later caught Webster on the Tarka Trail. He then co-operated with Devon and Cornwall Police by showing them where he had committed other crimes. He already has 61 previous court appearances for various offences. Prosecutor Malcolm Galloway said police had written to the court to comment on Webster's impressive co-operation in helping solve a further 76 crimes.

Beware of Greenwashing: Avoid Eco-Hype: As increasingly more businesses provide "green" products and services, others are inflating or misrepresenting the environmental performance of their products or services. Smart businesses and marketers should consider the following tips for making environmental claims responsibly. As demand for environmentally preferable purchasing increases, "greenwashing" — the practice of misleading purchasers about the environmental benefits of a product or service — remains a key concern. "All it takes is a few big scandals about something not being very green — after it was promoted as green — and consumers will stop trusting," Anastasia O'Rourke, co-founder of the research firm Big Room, Inc.
Meanwhile, S.C. Johnson & Son faces a class action suit alleging that placing a proprietary "Greenlist" seal on its Windex window cleaning products misled consumers into believing that the products were independently certified by a third party; the Greenlist was actually an S.C. Johnson-conceived program. "Unfortunately, not all manufacturers have made the investments necessary to provide more environmentally preferable products," Scot Case, founding board member of the International Green Purchasing Network, has written at GovPro.com. "In order to compete in a market that demands 'green' products, some manufacturers have resorted to creative advertising instead."

The best street handball players dominate parks like gunslingers in a western. Handball has been a feature of urban life for generations, a pastime of laborers and lawyers, a fixture in parks, private clubs and prison yards, a passion that transcends class, religion and ethnicity. Rambo walks with a limp, the result of a fall from a three-story building during his days as a window washer 20 years ago. These days, he teaches kick-boxing and tends a samurai sword rack at his home in Downey, Calif.

Squeegee Pro: A couple with a neighboring business was sure a lot more than massages was going on inside. The sign on the door may read "no soliciting" but according to neighbors at an Irvine business park, there was plenty of solicitation of a different sort. "We just started noticing that everyone going in was a male and it was just constant foot traffic," said Paul Slaney. "I just thought it was really strange…just a short period of time and constant flow of guys," said Elizabeth Meehan. Slaney and Meehan bought Squeegee Pro Window cleaning at the beginning of the month. Although there was no sign on the neighboring business, it went by Young's Chiropractic according to its website. The couple's suspicions and research soon led them to sites reviewing so called "massage parlors." "They're talking about the services they got and they're saying it's right next to Squeegee Pro," Meehan said.
Believing they bought a business in a city consistently ranked as the safest in the country, they contacted police and local paper. Then on Tuesday, city citations and tenancy termination notices were left at the business - revealing that employees were living there as well. "I have no idea what those women's personal circumstances are but I could never imagine anyone else going in there would want their daughter or their wife or their mom having to go through what these women probably go through," Meehan said. "I just think it shows ordinary people can make a difference," said Slaney. "If you see something you can say something and something can really happen from that." The business closed up early and CBS 2/KCAL 9 was unable to reach the listed owner, Soon Kim, for comment. Irvine police said as soon as one of these plaxes shuts down, it tends to pop up somewhere else. That's way police emphasized it important for citizens to be their eyes and ears.



Those who doubted whether Eau Claire could support the new apartment buildings going up in the Phoenix Park area might want to reconsider their skepticism. Steven Smith of S&J Window Cleaning in Eleva washed windows Tuesday at the mixed-use building scheduled to open this weekend at 312 Wisconsin St. in downtown Eau Claire. All the 24 apartments are leased in the building, which is part of the North Barstow Redevelopment Project.

Hands up if you remember spiderman? - Dan Bourke recalls the day a French daredevil risked life and limb to climb One Canada Square. There's a book called Let The Great World Spin, about that bloke who walked on a tightrope between the World Trade Centre towers in the '70s - the one they did that film about, Man On Wire. Actually, it's not about Philippe Petit as such, although he is in it. It's about his walk and about a pretty randomised selection of Taxi Driver-era New Yorkers - projects hookers, a radical monk, drugged-up artists - some of whom witnessed the event. Its given added poignancy, of course, by the fact that the two towers don't exist any more, and there are plenty of more light-hearted Quantum Leap style ironies of anachronism.
The French free-climber who set himself the mission of scaling One Canada Square without ropes? Alain Robert, he is called. Why are these people always French? It was a Friday, October 2002. We knew he was going to try, I seem to recall. His people must have put it about. Security knew too, and they were watching the Tube station for him, but one man slips through that crowd pretty easily. We heard about it while he was up about floor three. He hooked his little French hands and feet into the grooves used by the window cleaners' cradle. A crowd grew. No one could get near him - the security guards here don't look like mountaineers. A base jumper, who that night would leap with his packed parachute from the top of the building site that would become the Marriott, was the first to notice the rain. He gave up on the 35th floor, the climber, Robert. The wind is pretty strong up there. Those non-mountaineering security guards, in the cradle of a window cleaner, got him to the top. The police had a word with him. Then sent him on his way.