A Life On The Edge

French-born new American citizen Juju Julien has led a peripatetic life. Now settled in Telluride, he says the American Dream has nothing to do with money; it’s about opportunity.

For Juju Jullien, a life on the edge (Raised in the French Alps, rope technician now calls Telluride home): On a recent weekday morning, a crowd of a dozen or so tourists gathered on a rugged switchback leading up to the top of Bridal Veil Falls, tumbling out of their four wheel drive Jeeps to gawk and take pictures.

The scene was beautiful: a bluebird day, the box canyon walls resplendent in their deep, earthy red and Bridal Veil Falls tumbling down with renewed vigor after recent rain and snow. But the tourists were focused on something else: a man walking across a newly installed water pipe like an acrobat, a grin on his face. Below the pipe is nothing but hundreds of feet of empty void before the nearby falls crash onto loose rock.

That man is Juju Jullien. Oblivious to the tourists below snapping pictures of his nimble ascent, he is focused on his work getting water pipes installed to eventually bring water from Blue Lake to the Pandora water treatment system. “Since I was a kid I always loved to approach the void and just stand up and try to control my fear and my balance,” Jullien said in an interview during a break from work, relaxing against a windowsill inside the Bridal Veil Power Station. “I think it’s beautiful. I’m never as happy as I am when I’m on the edge,” he added.

A crowd of onlookers gather below Juju Jullien, who is working with his rope access company just below the Bridal Veil Power Station.

Jullien grew up in the French Alps, and has an air of fearlessness and aliveness that is typical of mountaineers and alpinists when they are in their element. For 15 years, Jullien worked in the Alps as ski patrol, bombing avalanches and patrolling the backcountry. Starting in 1994, he would spend the off-season between winter and summer seasonal mountain jobs working in the burgeoning world of rope access.

Rope access work started in the 1980s in France, when urban companies in Paris and Lyon would call upon mountaineers to help with work like window washing and construction. The first real rope access company was called Les Alpinistes du Bâtiment, or the building alpinists. Mountain guides and alpine climbers flocked to the work, a natural fit for their bravery and technical skill on vertical walls.

Julien has lived in the U.S. since 2002 legally, and has since become a U.S. citizen. In 2005, he started RopeTech, an employee-owned window-washing and roof-shoveling business.

Jullien found plenty of gigs doing rope access work: installing phone antennas, washing windows, even rigging safe via ferrata routes in Europe. He’s even worked on offshore wind farms in Denmark and rigged 22,000 strobe lights to the Eiffel Tower. Then he found Telluride, a mountain town paradise for a ski mountaineer like him with the added benefit of plenty of rope access work. He started by window washing at The Peaks and has found work ever since. “I live in Telluride and I have a job in my specialty. I feel lucky. I worked hard for it, but I feel lucky,” he said.

Back to that opening scene, where Jullien is walking across a 2000-pound steel pipe to the marvel of a crowd of people below. What the tourists can’t see from far away is the redundant safety system that Jullien and his workers maintain. He and his business partner Damon Johnston, with whom he runs a company called Access in Motion, are certified by the both the Industrial Rope Access Trade Association and the Society of Professional Rope Access Technicians.

They always have two locking carabiners affixed to a static rope when they’re working at height, in addition to the professional grade equivalent of what is essentially a Petzl GriGri, a belay device that automatically locks if the wearer takes an unexpected fall. “Unless someone shows up and cuts my rope, nothing can happen to me,” Jullien said. “And I have a double rope system.” “It seems dangerous, but it’s the safest industry in the construction industry,” he added.

Julien saw an opportunity to use his technical rope and rigging skills to extend his work visa. He would go to England to obtain a worldwide certification for rope access and rigging, something he says doesn’t’ really exist in the U.S.

While rope access gear is similar to that used by rock climbers, much of the professional gear was actually inspired by cavers. Cavers use static ropes (rock climbers use dynamic ropes that stretch) and cavers also depend on ascenders, or jumars, to climb back up out of the cave they descended into to explore.

It’s not easy work. Jullien’s current work site with the Town of Telluride project is at 10,500 feet, with the cold, wet Bridal Veil Falls constantly booming in the background. Plus the job itself is a physical challenge: lifting, pushing, rigging and climbing. “We help each other like we would do climbing or hanging out in the mountains,” he said. He and his team always work in pairs: two points of contact with safety ropes, two ropes and two workers who are trained to rescue each other if anything goes wrong.

“You try to be alive every day, by taking chances,” Jullien said. “There are pros and cons of that lifestyle, but I like it. There is only so much you can go against your own self. That’s me.” With that, the interview is over and Jullien swings out of the open window, clips back onto his rope, and walks above the void again. Back to work, living and working on the edge.

Latest Spotlight On Falls From Height

Eric was injured in a fall from a roof while at work on Wednesday July 11th. He has been in ICU for several days with many broken bones and 2 collapsed lungs but is slowly making a recovery.

Benefit fund established for victim of fall (WENATCHEE) — Friends of a Wenatchee window cleaner injured in a severe fall last week seek donations to help his recovery. Eric Opel, owner of Eric’s Affordable Window Service, fell from a Chelan roof July 11 and suffered broken collar bones, ribs, shoulder blades and one arm, as well as collapsed lungs and a fractured lower vertebra. He remained Saturday in intensive care at Central Washington Hospital, in serious but stable condition. Donations to help his family with expenses can be made to the Eric B. Opel Benefit Fund at Cashmere Valley Bank, 1100 Maple Street, Wenatchee, or any Cashmere Valley Bank Branch.

---------------------------------------

Illegal maid's garbage-chute escape ends in death - She plunged from 8th floor after trying to escape. An Asian housemaid plunged to her death from the eighth level into the building’s chute in Abu Dhabi after she tried to escape inspectors coming to the apartment for a washing offence, mistaking them for immigration law enforcers. After she heard the knocking on the door, the 28-year-old maid climbed out of the bathroom window, grabbed the sewage pipe and tried to climb down to the ground floor. But she lost her balance and plunged down to death into the chute.

A 28-year-old maid plunged to her death from the eighth floor of a building in Khalidiya area of Abu Dhabi on Saturday.

The inspectors had asked the maid to open the door to hand her a fine for violating Municipality’s laws on hanging the wash on the balcony but she thought they were there to arrest her for absconding from her sponsor. “This incident illustrates a permanent state of fear and anxiety suffered from the offenders of the immigration and labour laws…they just try to escape by any means even through this could cost them their lives,” said Colonel Rashid Mohammed Bursheed, director of the criminal investigation department. Bursheed said preliminary investigation ruled out criminal act but it was not clear whether the maid was on her own in that apartment. “We appeal for all people and establishments not to employ illegal migrants and to shut all doors that will encourage them to stay in the country illegally,” he said.

Mystery behind worker's horror plunge: A 20-year-old construction worker was fighting for his life last night after plunging at least six floors from a central Auckland building - in full view of his colleagues and horrified university students. The man, a contractor for Fletcher Construction, fell while working on the Auckland University of Technology's new 13-storey design and creative technologies building yesterday. Work was suspended at the site as police and Department of Labour investigators examined the scene. One colleague said he couldn't understand how the man could have fallen as he would have had to pass through a barrier to get outside. A witness said it appeared he fell from scaffolding on to a bin full of metal pipes. Students coming to and from class in another building saw the fall, and others heard the man hit the ground. Some onlookers thought he fell from at least the eighth floor, although a St John Ambulance spokesman said it was about the sixth floor.
The site was shut down about 2pm and the 250 workers sent home.

The student initially thought the worker was dead. "They covered him over him completely with jackets and we thought that was the end. No one did any CPR so we were pretty sure it was all over." The man "looked so young". "He was completely grey - all the colour had gone out of him. He had tattoos on his chest and they stood out heaps because he was so white." She said the workers who were first to their injured colleague took off his shirt straight away and then covered him with jackets.

FALL SURVIVORS

February 2012: Window cleaner Louisa Kuypers, 18, fell 30 metres from the roof of the Lion Breweries office building in Carlton Gore Rd, Newmarket. She was critically injured.
December 2011: Mikaela Blayney, 20, plunged six storeys during an acrobatic abseiling group's performance above Aotea Square. She broke only her cheekbone.
June 2011: A Wellington window washer fell from the fifth floor of a building and on to a car, only fracturing his big toe.
July 2010: A 15-year-old survived a 50m plunge from a balcony at the Proximity Apartments in Manukau, through a carpark roof on to a concrete floor. The teenager suffered broken bones and internal injuries.
August 2010: A North Shore 18-year-old fell seven storeys during a night of drinking and taking Ecstasy. She suffered breaks in her vertebrae, a punctured lung and three broken ribs.

The Immigrant High-Rise Window Cleaner: His Story

Immigrant Experience: Juju Julien Loves the Possibilities by Jesse James McTigue. WE DO WINDOWS – French-born new American citizen Juju Julien has led a peripatetic life. Now settled in Telluride, he says the American Dream has nothing to do with money; it’s about opportunity.

There are many things about Juju Julien that are French through and through. He speaks English with a heavy French accent, he sips cold, white wine throughout our interview and he is in a whimsical love affair. His affair, however, is not with a woman. Instead he is in love with possibility and independence – two ideals that also make him very American. Julien was born in France, but seemingly raised all over the world. Instead of a place, the vast experiences and eclectic group of people he encountered influenced him most throughout his formative years.

“Sometimes you take a look at your life, and it’s like shaking sand [through a sifter],” Julien explains. “And, you see what stays on top – the key moments [in your life].” For him, what is left represents those experiences and people who have made him who he is today. After sifting his life, the substrate that remains is boarding school, traveling and ski patrol. Julien was first sent to boarding school when he was seven. “My mom couldn’t handle me,” he explains, then with a wry grin adds, “I had too much energy.” Although he was away from his mom for most of his childhood, he claims he still felt her influence. “She raised me from a distance,” he explains.

After floating through different boarding schools, Julien finally found one where he fit in, an international school in Le Chambon sur Lignon called College Cevenol. "I loved it,” he explains, “because there were kids from all over the world and teachers from all over the world, you do your own schedule, and it’s in the woods.” Julien’s education was supplemented by intermittent, international trips with his dad. His dad left the family when Juju was seven and worked internationally as a civil engineer, completing stints in Algeria, Kuwait and Haiti, to name a few. When Juju was 15, he recalls biking with his dad from France to Algeria. “He has many flaws,” Julien explains, “but he taught me a way of traveling, which is, you leave everything you know at home and you go with a naked brain.”

Three years later, in 1986, Julien accompanied his dad to Haiti, where he volunteered to improve the island’s water distribution system. “I saw people who had huge resumes, hydraulic engineers,” he recalls, “but they couldn’t deal in Haiti.” But for Julien, confronting remote areas and unconventional situations with a “naked brain” is how he thrived. Ski patrol became an obvious career fit for Julien, so after finishing school, he moved to Tignes and began working as a patrolman. In retrospect, patrol taught Julien the skills he would rely on in all of his future pursuits. “Patrol was huge.” Julien says. “You work hard, you work on a team and learn the mountains…you need to know about mountaineering, you need to know about explosives, you fly in helicopters. I don’t think people realize how much skill it takes to be a ski patroller.”

For the next decade, Julien took advantage of the flexibility of ski patrol life, working in the Alps and Australia; spending a year with a tribal group, the Kanaks, on New Caledonia; and completing a U.S. ski safari that included two weeks in Squaw Valley, Jackson Hole, Aspen and Telluride ski resorts. “I brought like 20 pounds of cheese and sausage,” Julien recalls. “You can find good wine here, but good cheese and sausage is hard to find. You travel like this with ski patrollers, you get the best.” This was Julien’s first introduction to the U.S.

Through a string of French-ski-patrol-exchange participants and like-minded-mountain-people, Julien returned to Telluride in 2000 for a friend’s wedding. Julien made fast friends, experienced his first Bluegrass Festival, fell in with the lifestyle and continued to come back for three-month stints – the maximum time his visas would allow. “You never think you can overstay your visa,” Julien recalls, “but you love it so much, it’s worth it to stay and be illegal than go home.” After a few visits, Julien fell into the temptation and overstayed his visa.

During this time, Julien saw an opportunity to use his technical rope and rigging skills to extend his work visa. He would go to England to obtain a worldwide certification for rope access and rigging, something he says doesn’t’ really exist in the U.S. It would allow him to do high-angle work on dams, towers, windmills, oil rigs, buildings and, most importantly, give him a special talent qualifying for him for a longer visa. The catch: He was currently illegal in the U.S. and couldn’t get out. “I didn’t want to cross the border [into Canada] with an expired visa,” he explains. “They would ban for me for ten years.” Instead, Julien crossed into Canada hidden in the back of a truck, then flew home to get his paperwork in order.

Julien has lived in the U.S. since 2002 legally, and has since become a U.S. citizen. In 2005, he started RopeTech, an employee-owned window-washing and roof-shoveling business. Julien, along with one of his partners, also work wherever opportunity calls. “Now we work in Alaska, we work everywhere,” Julien explains. “I was in South Korea working on an oil ship.” He grins and points toward the company’s mantra, embroidered on his one-piece, denim jumpsuit. It reads, “Don’t smoke, but love to get high.”

For Julien, the allure of living in the US has been the fulfillment of his version of the American dream. “My French friends talk about the American Dream, but they don’t know what it means," he explains. “They think it means making a million dollars, but it has nothing to do with money, it’s about opportunity. It’s more about being excited by doing something of your own – I love the possibilities.”

Also featured before here.

More Working at Height Problems NYC

NYC Construction Worker Killed in Fall 54 minutes ago.
NEW YORK (AP) — Authorities say a construction worker has died in a nine-story fall at a building under construction on Manhattan's East Side. New York City Buildings Commissioner Patricia Lancaster says it appears the worker's nylon safety strap failed while he was installing windows on Monday. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer says a preliminary investigation by his office shows a record of about 36 violations at the construction site. The accident occurred about two blocks from the building where a window washer died in a 47 story fall in December.

This follows on from another story recently with the headlines that workers pay price of NYC boom. New Yorkers who live next to construction sites – and there are thousands of active sites in the city – have been a little uneasy lately. A few weeks ago, a crane 60 metres long tipped over, crushing a nearby building and killing seven people. Four of them were construction workers. Three of them were just hanging out on a Saturday afternoon. And it was not an isolated incident. There has been a string of highrise construction accidents in recent months, including two window washers who plunged more than 40 floors to what should have been certain death. Miraculously, one survived. The fact is, on average one construction worker dies a week in New York City - and for every one killed many more are injured. Latinos make up the largest, and fastest growing, group of victims, like "Juan", 35, who fell and split his head open on the job three years ago. Juan had been thrilled to make as much as $130 a day at building sites, enough to take care of himself and his wife and four children back in Mexico. He could make more money and work fewer hours in construction than he did washing dishes. Then he fell through a hole in the floor, landing on his back in the cement basement. He lost a lot of blood and was unconscious in the hospital for a week. Most construction fatalities are the result of falls. Of the 43 incidents that took place in New York in 2006, almost half of them involved Latinos, according to the Department of Labour Statistics.

Undocumented workers are easy to find. Every morning they group along 69th street in Queens, at a community centre on Staten Island, and in many other New York neighbourhoods where recent immigrants live. Contractors in vans or pick-up trucks drive up looking for cheap labour. Typically, the workers swarm and there is a brief period of negotiation, then a few men jump in and are whisked off to job sites. They have been in high demand. Spending on construction climbed seven per cent in 2007 to $26.2 billion, according to the New York Building Congress, a trade organisation. According to New York Construction Workers United, about 64 per cent of the city's 250,000 construction workers are immigrants who do the vast majority of non-union work. Basic security equipment like harnesses and – in Juan's case - hard hats are often lacking from job sites. Those who do receive safety equipment are often forced to pay for it themselves. Many are afraid to complain because they do not want to be blacklisted or risk being deported if they are illegal.
The crane accident has prompted municipalities from cities such as Philadelphia to Dallas to review the regulations governing construction sites – and many have found them lacking. And one thing is clear after the March crane accident that killed seven people - dangerous construction sites can put the entire public at risk.