High Rise Window Cleaning — Gladstone Street, South Melbourne

A tower has no cheap way up. Every pane above the ground floor is reached by rope, by a building maintenance unit if the building has one, or not at all, and the access is most of what the job costs. Anything skipped stays skipped for another year, because nobody sends a crew back up for one elevation. Three towers multiply the problem rather than adding to it. Each building has its own anchor arrangement, each elevation has its own wind exposure, and each one has residents who need to know when somebody will be outside their window. None of that carries over from one tower to the next, so the set-up work happens again every time.

Rope access on all three, worked top-down so runoff never crossed glass that was already finished. Each elevation was rigged and checked on its own rather than treated as a repeat of the last, because the anchors and the wind change from face to face and assuming otherwise is how people get hurt. A crew of four ran it across three weeks: descents on the live face, ground control holding an exclusion zone under the drop line, and residents told each day which elevation was being worked. On a job of this length the sequencing is what keeps it to three weeks instead of five, and it is the part a client never sees.

• Rope access set-up and anchor checks on every elevation of all three towers
• External glazing cleaned top-down across twenty-two to twenty-five levels
• Frames and reveals cleaned with the glass
• Ground-level exclusion zone held under the live drop line
• Residents notified each day of which elevation was being worked
• Carried out as a subcontract for Gamo Cleaning

• All external glazing cleaned across three towers
• Buildings occupied and operating normally throughout
• Three weeks on site with a crew of four
• No disruption to entrances or to resident access