Creeper (construction)
When creep or leakage path is known in the construction industry all building openings, in which a normal-sized person only in creeping way to move. Another description for this type of openings is closable (see Schluf ).
Creepers can be found:
- as a supply tunnel for electrical and pipe installation ( crawl space )
- As a type of channel in sewer systems , they form the last hierarchical gradation in front of the pipelines that can no longer be serviced manually - today maintenance robots are used there - historically also common in covered mill channels
- As a sleeping chimney in ancient buildings: the chimney sweep had to climb into these to clean them
- in protective and defense structures, as access and escape tunnels - crawlways are already documented from prehistoric times, can be found in medieval castles , in peasant earth stables (from the migration of peoples to the Thirty Years War up to modern times) - the facilities are too sadly famous of the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War .
In a broader sense, the same terms are also used:
- in mining: Creepers are the earliest evidence of human mining activity. Prehistoric Celtic-Illyrian crawl tunnels were found both in salt mines, such as on the Hallstatt Salt Mountain, or secondarily in active mining. The man found in the salt in 1734 was preserved in such a passage .
- in caving for natural openings.
The following safety regulations apply to work in creepage distances ( repairs , cleaning , maintenance ) :
- the German BGR 117-1: work in containers, silos and confined spaces
- Austria: §§59, 60 General Employee Protection Ordinance, Federal Law Gazette No. 218/1983.
See also
literature
- Uli Gelbrich, Georg Reinwaldt: Technical Dictionary Bauwesen: Building and Civil Engineering: German-English, with About 35,000 Entries. Routledge, 1994, ISBN 3-86117-066-3 , p. 208.