“The height’s not so bad,” said Bryan Thomsonowak, dangling from a harness nearly 70 feet above ground at Drexel’s biowall in the Constantine N. Papadakis Integrated Sciences Building.
Thomsonowak, along with his colleague Andrew Lee, are employees of Parker Plants, the company tasked with maintaining the biowall, the largest living biofilter in North America and the only such structure installed at an American university.
Once a month, Thomsonowak and Lee devote a full Saturday to pruning and inspecting the 80-foot-tall, 22-foot-wide biowall.
“We usually split the wall in half vertically, and it takes us each about four hours to work our way from top to bottom,” Lee said.
To reach the top of the wall, Thomsonowak or Lee is hitched to a harness and a small wooden seat at the top floor of the building. Using a pulley system, the other person slowly pulls the seat to the wall. Once situated in the center of the wall, there are two ropes attached to the pulley system that allow them to move to either direction as needed.
“We’ve been doing this for almost a year now, and I think we’re finally getting the hang of it,” Lee said with a laugh.
The towering height of the wall might prove to be daunting for most, but for Thomsonowak, an arborist, and Lee, an avid rock climber, the process of mounting the wall is routine.