Health and safety

stelaking

No BIRDMAN of BOGNER , This year wot ever next .

Bronzie

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... nor108.xml

This country is so pre-occupied in wrapping people in cotton wool. If you want to jump off a pier or run down a steep hill chasing cheeses, what the problem as long as the entrants know the score and don't then burden the NHS with their injuries.

vermooten

I suspect the organisers are more pre-occupied with not being sued.

redvee

There is a similar event in sponsored by Red Bull, not sure when & where though :oops:

nwallace

If you read the explanation I read on the BBC website, because the pier has been shortened there is now a lack of water at the end of the pier, reckoned to be under 12ft.

The Wikifalsic page on swimming pools reckons 14 feet in a public diving pool.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/sussex/7339243.stm

richardast

The explanation seems fairly sensible.
Sounds like another Red Arrows style knickers in a twist for no reason story. Unless the reason is to get middle England wound up into buying more right wing newspapers.

Mr_Cellophane

redvee wrote:

There is a similar event in sponsored by Red Bull, not sure when & where though :oops:

&th June, Hyde Park. Saw the first one several years ago. Get there very early

http://www.redbullflugtag.co.uk/

Nuggs

Bronzie wrote:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/08/nbognor108.xml

This country is so pre-occupied in wrapping people in cotton wool. If you want to jump off a pier or run down a steep hill chasing cheeses, what the problem as long as the entrants know the score and don't then burden the NHS with their injuries.

Yep - you can't do things like that but if you want to drink 20 pints of lager of an evening, walk down the middle of the road and have a quick fight, that's just fine... :roll:

Bronzie

richardast wrote:

The explanation seems fairly sensible.

:oops:
Speed read the Torygraph article and must've skipped that bit :x - RTFM and all that applies to me.

vermooten

Nuggs wrote:

Yep - you can't do things like that but if you want to drink 20 pints of lager of an evening, walk down the middle of the road and have a quick fight, that's just fine... :roll:

Actually you can but don't expect anyone else to take responsibility for your broken neck.

My $0.02:
The whole Health & Safety stuff is great. As one who lived through the 80s, I got sick of a new disaster every week. I knew people who were in the Marchioness, a friend nearly died at Hillsborough (and his mate did die), I travelled through Kings Cross at the time of the fire, got traumatised by watching people in flames at the Bradford stadium, don't fly nowadays because of the seemingly-weekly air crashes, get nervous on ferries because of the Herald of Free enterprise... and so on and on and on. It was the response to these and similar events that's led to their being a greater awareness of public stafety by both government and - importantly - by scumbag lawyers. Now that there are fewer and fewer deaths by stupidity and carelessness and corporate greed, I don't see it as the nanny state "gorn mad" it's just ... sensible.

So roll your cheeses down steep hills, fly home-made contraptions into shallow water and enjoy life! I get my ya-yas by setting off speed cameras on my bike, and by descending twisty hills in Cumbria and in the Alps at 45mph.

Monty Dog

Yes, but risk management has become so obsessive, that if people have created an industry out of thinking 'if it could happen, it will happen' and have created a job for themselves creating all sorts of regulation for things that have an infintessimal chance of happening. I've worked in industries where we produced safety equipment for highly hazardous environments - particularly to the fire and rescue services - when producing life-saving equipment, you have to accept sh*t happens and through training and planning, manage the situation as it arises - but can't engineer out all the risk - which is what seems to be what people get obsessive about. In the defence industry, they use a term called ALARP - as low as reasonably practicable - sadly many of the H&S crowd seemed to have forgotten about.

richardast

We're not talking about people taking noble risks to save life and limb though.
We're taking about people wanting to dive from 10 metres height into a 3 metre depth of water dressed as a giant badger.
Would you want to be at the back of that queue in A&E, waiting to be seen with a genuine injury.

OffTheBackAdam

As against waiting at the back of the queue in A&E , waiting to be seen with a genuine injury, whilst they sort out an aggressive drunk, who's in there every Friday night after doing the same thing, or maybe that's this "genuine injury" or is it vermooten's road-rash they're treating, I mean, ridding a push-bike down a mountain at 45mph, dressed in ballet tights, is bloody stupid isn't it, should be made to pay for their own injuries if they've caused them by their own stupid actions. And all these smokers getting lung cancer and fat gits having infarcts, it's their own stupid fauly, should pay for that themselves too!