Reminds me of when I was in Korea in 1970. I was passing a construction site where a 15 story building was being built. For "scaffolding", a bamboo grid was built along one side of the building, tied together with ropes and tied to the building. A bus pulled up and about 50 Koreans got out. I was wondering how they got to the working story. They started climbing up hand over hand until they got to the top. Not too many beer breaks in that place....
I remember reading an article a number of years ago on the use of bamboo as scaffolding.. Apparently it is very common in asia, and that if done properly, it is/was considered as safe or safer than conventional scaffolding, and offers a number of operational advantages over conventional scaffolding.
Bamboo is lightweight, relatively stiff, yet flexible, inexpensive, and readily available. Apparently they are able to attain greater heights using bamboo than with conventional scaffolding, and the bamboo tends to survive storms better than conventional scaffolding.
