Gardens Riverside South is two towers, Parc and Arbour, on Duncan Street in West End, sitting alongside the northern scheme. Abseil Pro has cleaned the facade and certified the anchor system on both since 2021.

Two towers under one body corporate is what shapes the job. Rigging one and coming back for the other doubles the setup, so both are worked as a single visit on a single schedule, and anything found on one gets checked on the other while the crew is still on site.

At a glance

Location

West End, Brisbane

Services

Window and facade cleaning, height safety inspection and install

Access

Rope access, rigged from the roof

Frequency

Facade clean annually, anchors certified each year

Photos

On site

Two Abseil Pro technicians on rope cleaning the balcony facade at Gardens Riverside South — Two technicians on the same elevation, working down together.

Rope access technician descending the tower at Gardens Riverside South above the green wall — Down the elevation, green wall at the bottom of the drop.

Technician on rope seen through palm fronds at Gardens Riverside South — Working the balustrades, seen from the podium garden.

Two rope access technicians starting a drop from the roof at Gardens Riverside South — Starting the drop, one over the edge and one on the roof.

Technician on rope beside a planted resident balcony at Gardens Riverside South — Every drop passes somebody's balcony.

Rope and balustrade glass seen from a balcony at Gardens Riverside South — Balustrade glass, cleaned from the rope rather than over the rail.

Technician working balustrade glass at Gardens Riverside South — Finishing a balustrade run before moving to the next drop.

Two technicians cleaning the courtyard walls on poles at Gardens Riverside South — Courtyard walls and louvres, done on poles from the ground.

Pure water brush cleaning the blue glass soffit at Gardens Riverside South — The blue glass soffit over the walkway, cleaned from below.

Rope access technician rigging at a certified roof anchor at Gardens Riverside South — Rigging off a certified anchor before the first drop.

Anchor point load tester set up over a roof anchor at Gardens Riverside South — The tester braced over the anchor so the pull goes straight up.

Calipers measuring anchor displacement under load at Gardens Riverside South — Displacement measured while the load is held on.

The clean

Two towers, one visit

Both towers are cleaned in the same visit, top to bottom, so the scheme is disrupted once rather than twice and the two buildings never drift out of step with each other.

What the clean covers

Exterior shell glass and frames across both towers, and the outside of every balcony balustrade

Painted render, slab edges and ledges, where the staining actually is

Balcony soffits, cleaned up to the drip edge

Metal sunshades, fins, screens and the aluminium composite panel

A photo record of anything found on the facade, with the tower, level and elevation it sits on

How it is run

Drops run from the roof of each tower, one elevation at a time, worked top to bottom so nothing already cleaned gets dirtied on the way down.

Glass wants doing every six months and the facade elements every twelve, so the annual visit covers the whole envelope and a glass only clean can go in between if the committee wants it.

Height safety

The anchors get certified before anyone uses them

Everything on both towers is worked on rope, so the anchor systems have to be in certification before a drop is rigged. We installed part of the system in 2021 and have certified it every year since.

What the inspection covers

Every anchor, static line and bracket on both roofs, inspected against the manufacturer documentation and the Standards

Post installed anchors load tested to 7.5 kN under AS/NZS 1891.4 and AS/NZS 4488.2

An information tag fitted to every component with the date it was checked

An inspection report listing every asset on each tower, and a certificate valid for twelve months

Two towers, one register

Both roofs are inspected in the same visit and reported together, so the committee gets one set of paperwork with both towers in it rather than two documents that expire on different dates.

Anything that fails is tagged out on the spot so nobody can use it, and rectification is quoted separately rather than folded into the inspection.

How we get to it

Rigged from the roof of each tower

Everything is rigged from the roof. Keys signed out from management, gear carried up, then down the elevation on rope. Nothing goes on the footpath and the driveway stays open.

Working over a live scheme

Every drop passes somebody's balcony. Residents are notified before the crew starts on their face of the building, and drops are sequenced so nobody has a technician outside their window for a week.

Exclusion zones go in below live drops with a spotter on the ground, and roof access doors are locked behind the crew every time.

How we leave it

Tools tethered on every drop, and nothing dropped from height

Exclusion zones and signage set up before a drop starts and packed away after it

Keys and access codes used as agreed and handed back before anyone leaves

Every photo tagged with the tower, level and elevation

Anything that will not clean up written into the report rather than left for someone to find

Photos uploaded the same day, so the record exists whether or not anyone asks for it

Outcome

What the building gets

Two towers cleaned to the same scope in the same visit, one anchor register covering both roofs, and one certificate date to remember instead of two.

The rest follows from the same crew being on both buildings every year. Somebody who knows these elevations is on the rope rather than starting from drawings, and every visit leaves dated photographs of parts of the towers nobody can see from the podium.